Republican Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador filed a brief Tuesday petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the Biden administration from invoking a 1986 federal statute to override his state’s pro-life law.
“The whole point of Dobbs was to restore to the states their authority to regulate abortion. Yet the administration seeks to thwart Idaho’s exercise of self-government on this important topic,” the brief stated. It called the Biden administration’s “claimed abortion mandate” under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) “imaginary.”
“The Medicare Act generally — and EMTALA specifically — preserve the right of states to regulate the practice of medicine, including on the issue of abortion,” the brief went on.
According to a Tuesday press release by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) the Biden administration sued the state of Idaho in 2022 “claiming that it could use [EMTALA] to … force emergency room doctors to perform abortions that are unlawful in Idaho.”
ADF explained that, contrary to the administration’s claim, “there is no conflict between EMTALA and Idaho’s law as both seek to save lives and neither requires abortions to be performed.”
“After a lower court upheld the Biden administration’s attempt to rewrite EMTALA and prevented Idaho from enforcing its law,” the legal group explained, “the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and issued a stay allowing Idaho to continue to protect the lives of women and their unborn children as the litigation continues.”
ADF litigators are representing Labrador’s office in the pending case.
In comments to ADF, Labrador said: “Despite the portrayal by the media and the Biden administration, both Idaho law and EMTALA share a consistent goal: to protect everyone’s life, including unborn children.”
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“Idaho’s law is perfectly consistent with EMTALA, which provides explicit protections for ‘unborn children’ in four separate places,” he added.
“The notion that EMTALA requires doctors to perform abortions is absurd,” stressed the attorney general. “We are asking the Supreme Court to end the administration’s unlawful overreach and to respect the people of Idaho’s decision to protect life.”
President Ronald Reagan signed EMTALA into law in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). According to the federal government-run Medicare website, the purpose of the legislation was to “ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.”
During his presidency, Reagan was widely known as a staunch opponent of legalized abortion. Two years after signing EMTALA, he urged Congress to pass a pro-life law, stating that no one is “more powerless than the unborn.”
Last month, Labrador indicated he was “pleased and encouraged by the Supreme Court’s decision” to hear his case and issue a stay on the lower court ruling.
“The federal government has been wrong from day one,” he said at the time. “Federal law does not preempt Idaho’s Defense of Life Act.”
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
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