This past week, the state of Idaho argued before the Supreme Court that it should be allowed to violate federal law. Specifically, the state contends that its laws criminalizing abortion care should supersede the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which for decades has prohibited the inhumane practice of medical providers and hospitals turning away patients with acute, emergency medical needs.

Idaho’s laws technically permit doctors to perform abortions to save patients’ lives, but the difference between an assessment that a person’s life is at risk or not can shift in minutes, all under threat of prosecution if a medical provider picks “incorrectly.”

As with the ongoing case over efforts to ban the FDA-approved medication mifepristone, which is used in safe abortions, it’s clear that medical posturing notwithstanding, this isn’t really a case about the proper exercise of medicine but about ideological preference. It’s difficult to envision other medical procedures that the courts would even consider to be potentially outside the scope of federal emergency care requirements — imagine a case winding its way up the Supreme Court alleging that a state could criminalize the performance of appendectomies or dialysis. It wouldn’t happen because it shouldn’t happen; these are ridiculous questions on their face. But unfortunately, some of our nation’s esteemed jurists have decided to debase themselves by allowing this farce to continue.

It is ridiculous that state’s largest hospital system is having to airlift patients to other states to receive care that they are perfectly capable of providing themselves, were it not for the overhanging threat of prosecution. In forcing this situation, the state government is simultaneously forcing the waste of in-demand medical resources but decreasing the likelihood that life-saving interventions will be successful even in other states with more sensical laws. Every second counts in a medical emergency.

Idaho’s attorney, Joshua Turner, leaned on using vague and sanitized language to describe the impact of the state’s position, so let’s be clear about it here: pregnant people will get sepsis and uncontrolled hemorrhage, they’ll have hysterectomies and permanent infertility, some will die. Obviously, dying along with them would be any chance that the fetuses they carry could ever come to term. This stance helps no one and accomplishes nothing but threatening doctors for doing their jobs and putting Idahoans at risk.

Not that public popularity should be necessary to guarantee rights, but it’s also clear that anti-choice politicians are well out of step with the preferences of the majority of Americans, who have consistently voted to reject choice-restricting measures and rejected candidates who made that a central platform. In Arizona this week, enough GOP legislators in the House broke ranks to allow passage of a bill repealing the state’s 160-year-old total abortion ban. It appears that there’s sufficient support in the State Senate to do the same, and a Democratic governor stands ready to sign the bill.

In an era of dwindling bipartisan agreement, and with an issue as traditionally party-line divisive as abortion, this signals the extent to which the consensus is near-total. Attempts at heavy-handed or total abortion restrictions are antiquated and cruel, and have no real place in contemporary America, no matter what an ever-smaller minority of political elites in statehouses or courtrooms believe.