Much will be written about the impact of Moyle v. United States, the decision leaked on Wednesday and officially released on Thursday. The bottom line is that reinstating the federal government’s ability to enforce EMTALA, the Emergency Medicine Treatment and Labor Act, is objectively important for patients and emergency physicians in the states that have enacted severe abortion bans. In the end though, the hodgepodge of opinions, with various dissents and concurrences among the justices, will be discussed and ultimately, forgotten, as this case is kicked back to the lower courts for full review—heading the case into the pernicious cycle of “not now, but not never” when it comes to limiting access to abortion services for women in the United States.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says, “Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho, it is a delay. While this Court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.” Jackson really does seem to get us doctors and what we need to do to care for our patients.

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You know who doesn’t have a clue about what we do? Justice Samuel Alito, the proud author of the majority opinion in Dobbs and now the scribe of the dissent here in Moyle. It’s worth reflecting on the medically inaccurate and completely infuriating cases Alito references in his quest to force emergency physicians to stand idly by and watch women suffer if the care they need includes the termination of a nonviable pregnancy.

Throughout his dissent Alito uses inflammatory language like “abortion on demand” to describe circumstances where patients and their providers may jointly decide to terminate a pregnancy in the course of emergency medical care. He even says, “Government lawyers hit upon the novel argument that, under EMTALA … hospitals … must perform abortions on request when the ‘health’ of a pregnant woman is in serious........

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