WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court on Jan 5 let Idaho enforce its near-total abortion ban in medical emergency situations while also agreeing to hear the fight between state officials and President Joe Biden’s administration over the legality of the Republican-backed measure.

The justices granted a request by Idaho officials to temporarily lift a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the state’s abortion measure after concluding it must yield to a federal law that ensures that patients can receive emergency “stabilising care”.

The case tees up another showdown over abortion access, coming after the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in June 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe versus Wade decision that had legalised abortion nationwide. Arguments in the Idaho case are expected in April 2024, with a ruling by the end of June.

President Biden said the Supreme Court order to let Idaho enforce its strict abortion ban “denies women critical emergency abortion care required by federal law”.

“These bans are also forcing doctors to leave Idaho and other states because of laws that interfere with their ability to care for their patients,” President Biden said in a statement released by the White House.

The justices are also scheduled in the coming months to hear another major case on reproductive rights involving the Biden administration’s bid to preserve broad access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Idaho officials in November 2023 urged the justices to pause US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s August 2022 preliminary injunction issued after he concluded that the abortion measure conflicted with a 1986 US law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The Act requires hospitals to “stabilise” patients with emergency medical conditions.

Idaho’s Republican attorney-general and top Republican state lawmakers in court papers told the Supreme Court that Judge Winmill’s ruling had permitted “an ongoing violation of both Idaho’s sovereignty and its traditional police power over medical practice”.

Idaho was among the Republican-led states where new abortion restrictions were introduced or took effect after the Supreme Court’s reversal on the Roe ruling.

In Idaho, a so-called “trigger” law banning abortion that was passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by a Republican governor in 2020 automatically took effect upon the reversal. Idaho’s law, known as the Defence of Life Act, bans all abortions except in instances in which an abortion is found to be necessary to prevent the mother’s death.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Biden’s direction in July 2022 issued federal guidance stating that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labour Act takes precedence over state abortion bans.

Challenges to Idaho law

The Biden administration sued Idaho over its trigger law in August 2022, arguing that the measure conflicted with the 1986 law because the federal statute could potentially require abortions that would not be included under Idaho’s narrow exception for saving the mother’s life.

Judge Winmill that month agreed, blocking the Idaho law from being enforced in cases of abortions needed to avoid putting the woman’s health in “serious jeopardy” or risking “serious impairment to bodily functions”.

A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2023 agreed to let Idaho enforce its ban amid an appeal. But the full 9th Circuit later reversed the panel’s ruling, granting the Biden administration’s request to block the Idaho law while the appeal proceeds.

Abortion rights advocates have challenged the scope of abortion ban exceptions in several states due to uncertainty, including among physicians, about what medical emergencies during pregnancy would permit health providers to perform the procedure.

The administration has waged a similar legal war in Texas, where US District Judge James Wesley Hendrix blocked the federal government from requiring healthcare providers to perform abortions on emergency room patients when the procedure goes against a Republican-backed Texas abortion ban.

The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan 2 upheld that decision, ruling that the 1986 law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion”. The 5th Circuit’s decision came a month after the top court in Texas ruled against a woman who was seeking an emergency abortion of her non-viable pregnancy.