Supreme Court turns down Biden’s appeal in Texas abortion case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the Biden administration urging the justices to allow some emergency abortions in Texas.

The administration said that Texas’ strict abortion law conflicted with a 1986 federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, that requires emergency rooms in hospitals that receive federal money to provide some forms of emergency care.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is standard practice when the justices reject petitions seeking review. There were no noted dissents. The order let stand a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that said the federal law did not apply to emergency abortions.

The court’s order was broadly consistent with two rulings in abortion cases in June, one rejecting a challenge to abortion pills on standing grounds and the other letting emergency rooms in Idaho perform the procedure when the patient’s health is at risk. The theme that runs through the rulings is that the justices are not eager to return to the subject of abortion.

In a dissent in the Idaho case, Justice Samuel Alito rued the development.

“Apparently,” he wrote, “the court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents. That is regrettable.”

In the new case, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general, had urged the justices to decide whether the federal law displaced the Texas abortion law “in the narrow but important circumstance where terminating a pregnancy is required to stabilize an emergency medical condition that would otherwise threaten serious harm to the pregnant woman’s health, but the state prohibits an emergency room physician from providing that care.”

Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, told the justices that there was no conflict between his state’s law and the federal one.

In June, the justices sidestepped ruling on a similar clash between the federal law and Idaho’s abortion ban, dismissing an appeal in that case as improvidently granted. The ruling in the Idaho case left in place a lower court’s decision requiring emergency care there.

The court may yet return to the questions presented in the two cases, perhaps after the 9th Circuit rules in the Idaho case.

After the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, many states enacted or revived laws limiting the availability of abortion. The Biden administration then issued guidance saying the 1986 law required emergency abortion care in some circumstances despite the state laws.

The Idaho and Texas laws are not identical. The Idaho law made an exception for abortions “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman” but appeared not to address threats to a woman’s health. The Texas law permits abortion when needed to prevent a serious risk of “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

The administration contends that both state laws conflict with the federal one, which requires emergency abortion care if there is a risk to the patient’s life or a need to prevent serious harm to health, like organ failure or loss of fertility.

In the Texas case, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit ruled that the federal law “does not mandate medical treatments, let alone abortion care, nor does it pre-empt Texas law.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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