If a pregnant woman in Idaho comes to an emergency room facing a grave threat to health but isn’t facing death, doctors have to delay her care until she deteriorates “or they’re airlifting her out of the state so she can get the emergency care that she needs,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in her argument.
“One hospital system in Idaho says that right now, it’s having to transfer pregnant women in medical crisis out of the state about once every other week,” she said.
There has been an uptick in the number of patients transferred for life-saving abortions after Idaho banned the procedure, according to Dr. Jim Souza, the chief physician executive for Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System.
St. Luke’s, Idaho’s largest hospital system, wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that the legal uncertainty created by the state’s abortion ban means patients with emergency pregnancy complications are more likely to be transferred out of state for care unless they’re at “imminent risk of death.”
Souza said that in 2023, during an injunction on enforcement of the law as it pertained to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), only one patient in the emergency department was recommended to be transferred out of the state.
“In the short period of time, it’s been just a few months now that Idaho’s law has been in effect, six patients with medical emergencies have already been transferred out of state for termination,” Souza said in a call with reporters last week. “If we annualize that, we can anticipate up to 20 patients needing out-of-state care this year alone.”
Dr. Julie Lyons, a family medicine physician with St. Luke’s Health System, told CNN in February that she counsels patients on their first prenatal visit to “buy life-flight insurance,” in case they face a “rare situation that a complication does happen.”
Some doctors have also left Idaho as a result of the law, Souza said, creating a “destabilizing effect” on the hospital system.
