Opinion briefly posted online shows Supreme Court poised to restore emergency abortion access in Idaho

Access to emergency abortions in Idaho might soon be restored if a Supreme Court decision briefly posted on its website Wednesday is finalized in the days ahead.

The decision posted online shows that a majority of the justices voted to dismiss the dispute from their docket, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported the appearance of the opinion.

A court spokesperson confirmed that a “document” related to the Idaho abortion case had been “inadvertently” released, but stressed the decision isn’t yet official. The document has since been removed.

If it becomes official, the decision would restore a lower court injunction that sided with the Biden administration and barred the state from enforcing its broad abortion ban with respect to patients who seek emergency care from hospitals.

The case, Moyle v. United States, is the first time the court has evaluated an individual state’s abortion ban since it overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.

The case concerns an apparent conflict between state abortion bans and a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, that requires hospitals that take Medicare and Medicaid to provide stabilizing treatment when there’s an imminent threat to a patient’s life or health. The Biden administration argued that EMTALA requires hospitals to perform emergency abortions even in states that ban the procedure.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had been poised to hear arguments on the conflict before the Supreme Court intervened in January and agreed to take up the issue itself.

But the Bloomberg report said the decision revealed that the high court had directed that the case be “dismissed as improvidently granted.” That action, rarely taken by the court, signals the justices declined to rule on the case at hand after agreeing to do so.