After being mistakenly leaked earlier in the week, the Supreme Court published its decision in the hotly anticipated Moyle v. United States, which concerns whether federal law governing emergency medicine, known as EMTALA, overrides state bans on abortion in emergency situations. The Supreme Court essentially punted the question, allowing emergency abortions to move forward in Idaho, but setting up the courts to revisit the issue later. Even this was too much interference with anti-abortion zealotry for Justice Samuel Alito, though.
In fact, in his dissent, Alito presumed to understand emergency medicine better than doctors who do it for a living, wrote physician Dara Kass in a scathing takedown for Slate.
"You know who doesn’t have a clue about what we do? Justice Samuel Alito, the proud author of the majority opinion in Dobbs and now the scribe of the dissent here in Moyle. It’s worth reflecting on the medically inaccurate and completely infuriating cases Alito references in his quest to force emergency physicians to stand idly by and watch women suffer if the care they need includes the termination of a nonviable pregnancy," she wrote.
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In his dissent, Alito accuses the government and emergency doctors of "covertly colluding to expand access to abortion services," wrote Kass — something that is not happening.
"Among the most egregious assertions that Alito makes during his dissent are the medically fantastical situations he describes that somehow pit the survivability of the unborn with the EMTALA protected care of the mother," she wrote. "For example, Alito continues to perseverate over the mental health protections of EMTALA — which never have, and never will, apply to the provision of abortion services in emergency departments."
"Alito repeatedly declares that the obligation on hospitals is to protect both the mother and the unborn as if a physician is often looking for an emergency situation to serve as an excuse to sacrifice a healthy pregnancy as a cavalier treatment for the betterment of the mother’s life," she added. "He tacitly acknowledges that the care of first trimester dangerous pregnancies are different (he briefly discusses ectopic pregnancy treatment in this dissent) but fails to ever address the reality that nonviable pregnancies (molar pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, PPROM at 16 weeks) are not pregnancies we can save, and no matter how many times we tell him, it does not seem that he has the will or capacity to listen."
This dissent, she concluded, "is filled with medical misrepresentations and conjecture, but it’s clear that doesn’t matter. It was just meant to give marching orders to the lower courts so that the success of Dobbs, overturning decades of precedent protecting abortion access for American women, can be repeated, this time to narrow federal protections we provide to the sickest patients presenting to emergency departments all over the United States."