The Lawyer Defending Idaho's Abortion Ban Irritated the One Justice He Needed on His Side
BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
APRIL 24, 20245:39 PM
Justice Amy Coney Barrett famously provided the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. So if you are arguing in favor of an abortion ban, you probably dont want to alienate Barrettby, say, condescendingly dismissing her concerns when she points out that your legal theory doesnt make any sense. Yet that is what Joshua Turner did on Wednesday while defending Idahos draconian abortion restrictions, and much to Barretts evident irritation. Turnerwho represented the Idaho solicitor generals office in the second major abortion case to come before the high court after it promised us in its Dobbs opinion that the court was out of the abortion business in 2022might just have lost his case by repeatedly mansplaining his self-contradictory position to Barrett and the other three women justices. In his toneless, dispassionate telling, his entirely incomprehensible position was just too complex for them to understand. And so he just kept repeating it, over and over. These justices, including Barrett, sounded increasingly fed up with his chin-stroking dissembling on an issue thats literally life-or-death for pregnant women in red states. If the courts male members noticed Turners dismissive attitude toward their colleagues, they didnt care. The gender divide on the court has never been so revealing.
Perhaps because Dobbs was a threat to unknown future women, whereas real women are now being left to hemorrhage, lose the functioning of their reproductive organs, or be popped onto helicopters to receive out-of-state stabilizing care, none of the life-and-death harms being experienced in red states around the country feel very theoretical to anyone who has thought about pregnancy in a serious way. Yet, for male justices more worried about harms to the spending clause, nothing about potentially lethal pregnancies warranted even a moments pause.
Wednesdays case, Moyle v. United States, revolves around a clash between Idaho law and a 1986 federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (or EMTALA). Idahos abortion ban has no exception for the health of the patient; rather, it criminalizes abortion unless its necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. EMTALA, meanwhile, requires virtually all hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment for any condition that could reasonably be expected to put the patients health in serious jeopardy, as well as any condition that could seriously impair bodily functions or organs.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/idaho-abortion-ban-supreme-court-amy-coney-barrett.html
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The Unmitigated Gall
(3,837 posts)Before a life-saving abortion can be provided. Not "at risk of death", not "health potentially at risk", but actually coming to the point of dying.
Puke lawyers and politicians seem to think that the process of dying, once it begins, is something that can be arrested, turned around and recovered, like flipping a switch, like overturning, say, a legal precedent or a piece of legislation.
When that process towards dying begins, in many cases it will not be recoverable. Sepsis, blood loss, organ failure, a horrible phenomenon known as Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC) individually or in combination will take hold. Getting the expectant mother back will be a massive struggle, costing millions of dollars and likely ending with death or irreparable and crippling injury.
This feckless lawyer is standing in the SC, arguing for a policy that will kill first tens, then hundreds, then thousands of women. He'll likely never set foot on a delivery floor or operating room where these bloody tragedies will be playing out, horribly. Nor will the Extreme Court justices.
Sickening.