The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.

In practice, this has wound up being a ban on abortions needed to save women’s lives: according to Idaho hospitals, six pregnant women experiencing medical emergencies have had to be airlifted across state lines to hospitals in states with life and health exemptions in the months since Idaho began enforcing its abortion ban. One way to describe this state of affairs is to say that Idaho’s abortion law has come into conflict with medical best practice. Another way to describe it is to say that the law has forced pregnant women to flee the state for their lives.

The federal government says that Idaho’s ban on health-preserving emergency abortions conflicts with a federal statue known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or Emtala. The 1986 law requires that all emergency rooms located in hospitals that receive Medicare funding – that is, basically all of them – are required to issue stabilizing care to patients facing medical emergencies. The law was designed to ensure that patients in medical crisis could not be turned away from emergency rooms for lack of ability to pay.

In practice, the law also formalized the spirit of the medical profession’s ideals, giving doctors and hospitals an obligation to preserve their........

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