Justice Amy Coney Barrett famously provided the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. So if you are arguing in favor of an abortion ban, you probably don’t want to alienate Barrett—by, say, condescendingly dismissing her concerns when she points out that your legal theory doesn’t make any sense. Yet that is what Joshua Turner did on Wednesday while defending Idaho’s draconian abortion restrictions, and much to Barrett’s evident irritation. Turner—who represented the Idaho solicitor general’s office in the second major abortion case to come before the high court after it promised us in its Dobbs opinion that the court was out of the abortion business in 2022—might just have lost his case by repeatedly mansplaining his self-contradictory position to Barrett and the other three women justices. In his toneless, dispassionate telling, his entirely incomprehensible position was just too complex for them to understand. And so he just kept repeating it, over and over. These justices, including Barrett, sounded increasingly fed up with his chin-stroking dissembling on an issue that’s literally life-or-death for pregnant women in red states. If the court’s male members noticed Turner’s dismissive attitude toward their colleagues, they didn’t care. The gender divide on the court has never been so revealing.

Perhaps because Dobbs was a threat to unknown future women, whereas real women are now being left to hemorrhage, lose the functioning of their reproductive organs, or be popped onto helicopters to receive out-of-state stabilizing care, none of the life-and-death harms being experienced in red states around the country feel very theoretical to anyone who has thought about pregnancy in a serious way. Yet, for male justices more worried about harms to the spending clause, nothing about potentially lethal pregnancies warranted even a moment’s pause.

Wednesday’s case, Moyle v. United States, revolves around a clash between Idaho law and a 1986 federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (or EMTALA). Idaho’s abortion ban has no exception for the health of the patient; rather, it criminalizes abortion unless it’s “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” EMTALA, meanwhile, requires virtually all hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment for any condition that “could reasonably be expected” to put the patient’s health “in serious jeopardy,” as well as any condition that could seriously impair bodily functions or organs.

The Biden administration argues there’s a conflict between Idaho law and EMTALA: Where Idaho allows termination only when the patient is at the brink of death, EMTALA mandates intervention earlier, to stabilize the patient before she is literally dying, including situations in which she is facing organ damage, infertility, or other serious harms. So the administration sued the state, and a federal judge issued an injunction compelling Idaho to allow emergency abortions to preserve a patient’s “health.” Now SCOTUS must decide whether the federal statute limits the ability of states like Idaho to criminalize abortions that are health-sparing but not necessarily lifesaving. And that means slipping into their white coats and stethoscopes and explaining to America’s emergency physicians how to do their jobs without risking two to five years in prison and a loss of licensure for making poor guesses about what stabilizing care involves.