Not that long ago, the political airwaves were filled with talk about “late-term abortions.”

It was a rhetorical device that accused women of waiting until late in their pregnancies before deciding to seek an abortion for the sake of convenience.

Who does that? Year after year, physicians would try to set the record straight with Idaho lawmakers. But it made for a catchy phrase at a time when Idaho GOP politicians could pander to their political base within the anti-abortion rights movement without consequence because Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.

In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe and Idaho implemented an abortion ban, it’s become clear that women seeking abortions later in their pregnancies face awful choices:

A woman discovers one of her two fetuses is nonviable, threatening the survival of the second fetus as well as her own health.

A terminal fetus is causing its mother to suffer “mirror syndrome,” which means she was enduring the same ailments as her dying child.

The severe genetic condition afflicting a fetus puts its survival at risk while elevating the mother’s blood pressure so severely that she is confronted with the risk of permanent injury, such as a stroke or kidney failure.

A cancer patient must choose between continuing her treatment or carrying a fetus to term.

Given Idaho’s laws, physicians face a five-year prison term if they provide the medical care their patients so desperately need. As a result, Idaho health care providers have had their patients transferred to pro-abortion rights states, such as Washington and Oregon, or even Utah, where abortion is restricted but an exemption permits the protection of a woman’s health.

About a fifth of the state’s obstetricians and more than half of its maternal-fetal medicine specialists have left the state. Hospitals have closed maternity centers, and much of rural Idaho now exists in a maternal health care desert.

Even the last vestige of a legal shield protecting the ability of Idaho doctors to act in an emergency had been removed — thanks in large part to Attorney General Raul Labrador.

In conflict were two laws — the state’s abortion ban with no real exceptions except to save the life of a woman and the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires emergency room physicians to “stabilize” patients. Under normal circumstances, the federal statute takes precedence until the courts sort things out.

But in an unusual move, Labrador convinced the U.S. Supreme Court not only to bypass the full appellate process, but to put EMTALA on hold in Idaho, pending the final ruling.

Last week, the court reversed itself, lifting the injunction and sending what has become known nationally as the Idaho case back to the lower courts. So EMTALA is again the law in Idaho, and emergency room doctors can help preserve the health of their seriously ill patients.

But it’s only a reprieve. The question is sure to return to a radical Supreme Court that ultimately reversed Roe in the first place.

“This decision to put the case back down to the lower courts does provide some welcome relief for women and their doctors in Idaho,” Susie Pouliot Keller, Idaho Medical Association chief executive officer, told the Lewiston Tribune’s Rachel Sun. “But, given how much uncertainly there still is in Idaho law, there’s still much more work to do.”

That work involves inserting this language — or something close to it — into Idaho law: Permitting “the treatment of a woman whose pregnancy or other health condition in the good faith clinical judgment of her physician so complicates her medical condition as to necessitate impairment of a major bodily function or serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part; provided however that no abortion shall be deemed necessary because the physician believes she may or will take action to harm herself.”

Lawmakers had every opportunity to take such a step during this year’s legislative session. In fact, two House committee chairpersons — Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, at State Affairs, and Rep. John Vander Woude, R-Nampa, at Health and Welfare — told national media outlets a few months earlier that they intended to do just that.

But passing a health exception would have put Idaho in compliance with EMTALA, thereby eliminating Labrador’s standing to bring a case before the Supreme Court.

While not the only impediment to passing a health exception, Labrador’s legal predicament was a major factor behind lawmakers taking no action.

So before lawmakers convene in January, this attorney general has a choice.

If he endorses a health exception, it likely would pass. But Labrador would forfeit the right to make headlines while he fights EMTALA in the federal appellate courts and eventually makes a return trip to the Supreme Court.

Or he can continue to place the health of Idaho women at risk while undermining the state’s fragile health care network in order to further his own political and legal ambitions.

One way or the other, by this time next year you’ll know what kind of soul occupies the attorney general’s desk. — M.T.