OPINION: Attorney General Labrador continues to endanger pregnant women
Most lawyers will take a hint from the courts when they are told a legal argument does not hold water. Idaho’s Attorney General Raul Labrador is a rare exception. Despite having been told by three different courts — Idaho’s Federal District Court, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — that his argument on Idaho’s total abortion ban is wrong-headed, he keeps making the same losing argument. Labrador contends that Idaho’s abortion law is Identical in effect to a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires most hospitals to give stabilizing care to pregnant women who come to the emergency room with life-threatening complications.
After three strikes against him over the last couple of years, Labrador was at it again March 5, trying to convince the federal judge in Idaho, who first ruled against him, that he was right this time around. The judge did not seem to be buying the same old argument this time, mainly because it was dead wrong. The judge inquired of Labrador’s deputy at the hearing whether he should “substitute the attorney general’s judgment over what the doctors decided.” It was a good question because Labrador does not have any medical credentials. Just because he somehow managed to obtain a Juris Doctor degree does not mean courts should give weight to his medical views.
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