The Supreme Court is set to reject a challenge to emergency abortion care in Idaho, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The leaked ruling suggests the court will vote 6-3 to reinstate a lower court decision that allowed abortion care to be used in emergency situations in hospital emergency rooms. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito made up the three dissenting.
The version of the ruling dismissed the case as “improvidently granted,” meaning the high court shouldn’t have accepted to hear the case in the first place.
Bloomberg saw the ruling in Idaho and Moyle v. United States on Wednesday morning when the decision was briefly posted to the court’s website before it was removed.
“The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website,” Patricia McCabe, the Supreme Court’s public information officer, said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”
The case centers on a 2020 Idaho abortion ban, which was enforced directly after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court to determine if the narrow exceptions in Idaho’s near-total abortion ban override federally mandated requirements for physicians under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). EMTALA requires hospitals that participate in Medicare — the majority of hospitals in the country — to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.
Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, federal law by default overrides state law. But the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which repealed Roe v. Wade, left regulation of abortion to the states.
