Stroke, hemorrhage, sepsis: Idaho doctors detail ways abortion ban risks patients' health

Doctors in limbo after Idaho abortion ban

Since Idaho’s total abortion ban took effect in August 2022, physicians have faced uncertainty around how they can care for their patients. The law has just a few exceptions for reported instances of rape or incest, for nonviable molar or ectopic pregnancies and for preventing the death of a pregnant patient.

Absent is an important distinction: preserving pregnant patients’ health. Shortly after the ban became Idaho law, the Department of Justice sued the state and said this missing provision violates a decades-old federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law requires any hospital that accepts Medicare funding to stabilize patients experiencing a medical emergency, regardless of their ability to pay for treatment.

For more than a year, an injunction from the U.S. District Court of Idaho kept EMTALA in effect, allowing physicians to perform abortions as needed to stabilize emergency patients. Last fall, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that injunction, then swiftly reinstated it. In January, at the urging of Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take on the case. It quietly issued an order allowing Idaho’s ban on emergency health-preserving abortions to resume.

Uranga remembers exactly how she felt. She was hiking in McCall when she found out about the order through a group chat with other doctors.

“I knew how bad things were already, and I thought they couldn’t get any worse,” she said.

Dr. Mike Schneider, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist from Boise, told the Statesman in an interview that his entire team felt “completely deflated” by the Supreme Court order.

“It was like, ‘Why are they doing this to our patients? Why are they doing this to us as providers?’” Schneider said.

‘This is not theoretical’

In Statesman interviews and Supreme Court filings, physicians, medical associations and Idaho’s largest hospital system emphasized that emergency obstetrics cases are not just fodder for legal debate.

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