Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to use the word “woman” in her partial dissent Thursday in cases considering Idaho’s abortion ban.
Rather than answering the cases’ central dispute about whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires doctors to perform emergency abortions in conflict with Idaho’s pro-life law, the Supreme Court dismissed the cases as “improvidently granted,” reinstating an injunction on Idaho’s abortion ban issued by a lower court and sending the issue back to the Ninth Circuit.
The language in Jackson’s solo opinion, in which she concurred in the decision to reinstate the injunction and dissented from the decision to dismiss the case, is conspicuously free of gendered terms.