Supreme Court rejects challenge to abortion pill availability : NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday FDA rules on prescribing and dispensing abortion pills.

The court unanimously said the anti-abortion doctors who challenged the case had failed to prove they suffered harm because they didn't prescribe the drugs and therefore had essentially no interest.

The court said the plaintiff, an organisation called the Hippocratic Medical Union, had no right to go to court at all because it could not prove that neither the organisation nor its members had suffered any concrete damage.

In his opinion for the court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected every possible argument that anti-abortion doctors had made to argue that they had a right to sue.

They argued that doctors are statistically likely to be called to treat emergency patients who suffer complications after taking the abortion pill. But Kavanaugh pointed out that federal law clearly states that doctors cannot be compelled to perform abortions, assist in abortions, or treat patients who suffer complications from mifepristone. Moreover, he said, doctors “had no standing to challenge the FDA's drug approval simply on the theory that the use of the abortion pill adversely affects the abortion.” others This could mean more visits to the doctor.”

Similarly, he said, doctors don't have a general right to sue because they disagree with a general government policy. To illustrate the point, he said, if the government raises the speed limit, emergency room doctors can't challenge the policy on the grounds that it will increase the number of car accidents.

The court’s unanimous decision amounted to a legal workaround that left the FDA’s rules in place without directly addressing the regulations themselves.

This decision means, at least for now, Overall Structure of FDA Regulatory Authority It is a system for approving medicines and continually evaluating their safety, and for decades has been widely regarded as the gold standard for both safety and innovation.

Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Union, said the decision deprives women of important information about the risks of abortion pills. “It's unfortunate that these FDA decisions deny women the information they deserve before making permanent life-and-death decisions,” she said.

“This is a sad day for all who care about women's health and the lives of unborn children, but the fight to stop the distribution of unsafe mail-order abortion pills is not over,” said Katie Daniel, state policy director for SBA Pro-Life America.

Abortion rights advocates are relieved, but they know the fight continues. “This is not a crushing victory,” said New York University law professor Melissa Murray. “It's probably just a rest stop, a waystation. There will be new challenges to medication abortion.”

She says future challenges could come from conservative states that could legitimately argue that FDA restrictions on access would make their state abortion laws moot. After all, she points out, “if you get it in the mail, it doesn't matter what the state does in public law arguments.”

Mary Zeigler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written extensively on the history and politics of abortion, also sees a difficult future.

She said many prominent conservative groups and individuals who worked under the Trump administration are committed to urging Trump, if re-elected, to ban all abortions under the Comstock Act, an 1873 obscenity law that also banned the mailing of materials related to contraception and abortion.

The law hasn't been in place for at least a half-century, possibly longer, Zeigler said, and added, “If a prominent conservative group had told me they would be invested in turning the Comstock Act into prohibition law, [on abortion] And if that was going to be the cornerstone of what we expect from a second Trump administration, a few years ago I would not have believed it. I would have said it was so politically counterproductive. But here we are.”

Since the court overturned the ruling Roe v. Wade The pill has become the most popular abortion method in the United States since abortion rights were recognized in 2022. More than half of women who choose to terminate their pregnancies use an FDA-approved combination of pills that contains mifepristone, manufactured by Danco Laboratories and sold as Mifeprex.

The pill's dosage was first approved 24 years ago, and over the past eight years, officials have approved changes to the dosage and lifted some restrictions they deemed unnecessary.

For example, the drug can now be prescribed as early as 10 weeks into a pregnancy instead of the original seven weeks, and prescriptions can be filled by mail or at a pharmacy rather than in a doctor's office.Danko Labs says that as a result, there have been fewer complications than when the drug was first approved in 2000 with only a seven-week dosing period.

The Supreme Court's decision on Thursday overturned a ruling from the Fifth Circuit, widely considered the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. Of the 61 cases the court will hear this term, 10 are appeals from the Fifth Circuit. The abortion-pill case is the third overturn, with seven appeals from the Fifth Circuit remaining to be heard.

Siding with the FDA in the lawsuit were nearly every major medical association in the country and nearly every large and small pharmaceutical company regulated by the FDA, making it a rare case of a government regulator and the industry it regulates being on the same side. Dr. Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, one of the many pharmaceutical companies that sided with the FDA, called the lawsuit “a dagger to the heart of our entire industry” earlier this year.

For now, the possibility of repealing the FDA’s regulatory powers has been averted, but the direct challenges to the abortion pill and its availability remain unresolved and could be raised again in a separate lawsuit.