The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the Biden administration urging the justices to allow some emergency abortions in Texas.
The administration said that Texas’ strict abortion law conflicted with a 1986 federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, that requires emergency rooms in hospitals that receive federal money to provide some forms of emergency care.
The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is standard practice when the justices reject petitions seeking review. There were no noted dissents. The order let stand a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that said the federal law did not apply to emergency abortions.
The court’s order was broadly consistent with two rulings in abortion cases in June, one rejecting a challenge to abortion pills on standing grounds and the other letting emergency rooms in Idaho perform the procedure when the patient’s health is at risk. The theme that runs through the rulings is that the justices are not eager to return to the subject of abortion.
In a dissent in the Idaho case, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. rued the development.
“Apparently,” he wrote, “the court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents. That is regrettable.”
In the new case, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general, had urged the justices to decide whether the federal law displaced the Texas abortion law “in the narrow but important circumstance where terminating a pregnancy is required to stabilize an emergency medical condition that would otherwise threaten serious harm to the pregnant woman’s health, but the state prohibits an emergency room physician from providing that care.”
