In an apparent case of premature opinionating, the Supreme Court briefly posted a decision in an Idaho case centered on emergency abortions Wednesday, before quickly scrubbing it from its website.
The ruling would have affirmed a lower court injunction that allows abortions in medical emergencies to proceed in the Gem State, according to Bloomberg, which caught the inadvertent filing.
A Supreme Court spokesperson told The Post that an opinion in the combined cases of Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States “has not been released.”
“The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website,” the rep added. “The Court’s opinion in these cases will be issued in due course.”
The case is one of 10 opinions that remain outstanding before the end of the court’s term.
At issue in the Idaho case is the extent to which federal law trumps state law on abortion. The Biden administration argued that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) supersedes Idaho’s abortion ban — which has a carveout for the life of the mother — in emergency situations.
EMTALA, which was passed in 1986, mandates that emergency rooms that receive Medicare payments provide “necessary stabilizing treatment” in dire conditions.
A lawyer who represented Idaho downplayed any daylight between Idaho’s carveouts and federal policy regarding abortion in medical procedures. But he took issue with the government’s position.
“If ER doctors can perform whatever treatment they determine is appropriate, then doctors can ignore not only state abortion laws, but also state regulations on opioid use and informed consent requirements,” the attorney, Josh Turner, argued back in April.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barret and Chief Justice John Roberts seemed skeptical of Idaho’s arguments, as did all three liberal justices on the bench.
The Supreme Court has faced a fierce backlash from Democrats over its 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the nationwide right to an abortion.
A draft of the opinion in the case which overturned Roe, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, was leaked to Politico in May of that year and published weeks before it was officially handed down, in a stunning breach of protocol and precedent.
Earlier this month, the high court spurned a challenge to the widespread availability of mifepristone, part of a two-drug regimen commonly used to induce abortions.
In that ruling, the high court concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing.