WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court Thursday, access to a drug used in Nearly two-thirds of all abortions In the United States last year, in the first court ruling on abortion since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.
The nine judges ruled that abortion Opponents did not have the legal right to sue over the Federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to facilitate access. The case threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was part of the majority favoring overturning Roe, wrote on behalf of the court on Thursday that “the federal courts are not the proper forum to address plaintiffs’ concerns about the FDA’s actions.” “.
Abortion is banned at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, and after about six weeks of pregnancy in three others, often before women realize they are pregnant.
While welcoming the decision, President Joe Biden indicated that Democrats would continue to campaign intensively on abortion ahead of the November election. “This does not change the fact that a woman’s right to receive the treatment she needs is in jeopardy, if not impossible, in many states,” Biden said in a statement.
And the High Court is separately considering another abortion case, on whether a federal emergency care law in hospitals overrides state abortion bans in rare emergency cases in which a pregnant patient’s health is seriously threatened.
More than 6 million people have used mifepristone since 2000. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and prepares the uterus to respond to the contraction-inducing effect of a second drug, misoprostol. Dual therapy has been used to terminate a pregnancy up to 10 weeks gestation.
Sagar Meghani, AP correspondent in Washington, reports that the Supreme Court has unanimously approved access to a widely used abortion drug.
Health care providers said that if mifepristone was no longer available or too difficult to obtain, they would only use misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective at ending pregnancies.
The Biden administration and drugmakers had warned that siding with abortion opponents in the case could undermine the FDA’s drug approval process beyond the abortion context by inviting the justices to question the agency’s scientific judgments. The Democratic administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone, have argued that The drug is among the safest the FDA has already been approved.
The decision “guarantees access to a medicine that has decades of safe and effective use,” Abigail Long said in a statement.
The plaintiffs in the mifepristone case, anti-abortion doctors and their organizations, argued in court papers that the FDA’s decisions in 2016 and 2021 to ease restrictions on obtaining the drug were unreasonable and “endangered the health of women across the country.”
Kavanaugh acknowledged what he described as the “sincere legal, moral, ideological and political objections of opponents of elective abortion and the FDA’s relaxed regulations on mifepristone.”
Federal laws already protect doctors from being forced to perform abortions or provide any other treatment that goes against their beliefs, Kavanaugh wrote. “Plaintiffs have not identified any instances where a physician was required, despite conscientious objections, to perform an abortion or provide other abortion-related treatment that violated the physician’s conscience since the approval of the mifepristone in 2000,” he wrote.
Ultimately, Kavanaugh writes, anti-abortion doctors have come to the wrong forum and should instead devote their energies to persuading participants and regulators to make changes.
These comments highlighted the issues of the 2024 election and the possibility that an FDA commissioner appointed by Republican Donald Trump, if he wins the White House, will consider tightening access to mifepristone.
Abortion rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief after the ruling, but they echoed Biden on the impact of the ruling two years ago.
“Ultimately, this decision is not a ‘victory’ for abortion; it simply maintains the status quo, which constitutes a serious public health crisis in which 14 states have criminalized abortion,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive. Rights, said in a statement.
The mifepristone case began five months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Abortion opponents initially won sweeping ruling nearly a year ago U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee in Texas, who would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Court of Appeals left the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone intact. But that would undo changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that relaxed some conditions for administering the drug.
The Supreme Court stayed the appeals court’s amended decision, then agreed to hear the case, although Justices Samuel Alito, the author of the decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas would have allowed entry into enforcement of certain restrictions while the case progressed. But they too joined the court’s opinion on Thursday.
The push to restrict abortion pills likely won’t end with the Supreme Court’s decision, said the lawyer who represented anti-abortion doctors and their organizations in the case.
The ruling that the doctors do not have the legal right to sue paves the way for lawsuits from other countries, including three other states that Kacsmaryk previously allowed to join the case, a said Erin Hawley, attorney for the group Alliance Defending Freedom.
Hawley said she expects Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to continue the lawsuit originally filed in Texas.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, said in a statement that states have “status that doctors do not have,” confirming that he would pursue the case in Kacsmaryk’s court.
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Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.
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