Solomon Center Panel Discusses Future of Emergency Abortion Litigation
After the Supreme Court left open the question of whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires abortions for emergency stabilizing care in Moyle v. United States this summer, hospitals, health care providers, patients, and state governments have been left in limbo as litigation continues in Idaho and Texas.
On Sept. 26, the Solomon Center and Yale Health Law and Policy Society hosted a panel on the future of EMTALA and access to emergency reproductive health care. Yale Health Law and Policy Society board member Indu Pandey ’26 organized the event. The discussion featured Dr. Loren Colson, co-President of Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare and a practicing abortion provider in Idaho, and Professor Joanne Rosen, an expert in reproductive health care public policy from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, moderated by Priscilla Smith '91, Director and Senior Fellow of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice.
Colson and Rosen laid out the medical and legal landscape for access to abortion care for pregnant people in life-threatening situations to a full audience in Baker Hall. Colson drew on his experiences as family doctor and practicing abortion provider in Idaho, which has a near-total abortion ban that temporarily went into effect while the Supreme Court was considering Moyle. He noted the short-term impacts of Idaho’s ban on care, such as hundreds of people requiring airlifts out of the state to access stabilizing abortion care.
Although Moyle prevents Idaho from prohibiting emergency abortion care under EMTALA, the uncertain regulatory environment has been driving doctors out of the state, especially in rural areas, due to fears of incarceration and harm to their families, burnout from high patient loads, and the inability of family doctors to practice the full range of their profession. Colson noted how states like Idaho, in addition to passing abortion bans, have been dismantling reporting mechanisms for maternal mortality, making it much more difficult to measure the true human impact of these bans.
Rosen detailed Moyle’s unusual procedural posture. Despite the Court taking an emergency application to review the case at Idaho’s request, it declined to rule on the merits — instead dismissing the case as “improvidently granted.” Arguing that the case was underdeveloped, the Court sent it back to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Biden administration’s guidance on EMTALA issued after the Dobbs decision has also been challenged in Texas; the combination of the two, Rosen noted, makes it highly likely the Supreme Court reviews emergency abortion care again in the near future.
While EMTALA can be useful in some cases, Rosen cautioned the audience against thinking the statute could create a workable statutory right to abortion. The statute is narrow and, at nearly 40 years old, was not drafted with a post-Roe world in mind.
