AP is live outside the Supreme Court as it unanimously preserved access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.
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CURTIS YEE
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The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to preserve access to the abortion pill mifepristone, a pill used in the most common way to end a pregnancy.
Follow live updates below as AP reporters dig into the ruling and reaction.
Read the full ruling
Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said the ruling “demonstrates a valuing of science, medical expertise, and centering the needs of our communities.”
“The Court’s dismissal on standing allows us to center the medical recognition of the facts is a powerful affirmation of what we have always known: mifepristone is a safe and essential medication, and there is no legitimate medical or scientific reason why access to mifepristone should be limited,” said Perritt, who is also an OB/GYN in Washington, D.C.
Abortion rights groups respond to Supreme Court ruling
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, expressed relief at the decision but frustration that the case, which she called “meritless,” made it up to the Supreme Court at all.
“Unfortunately, the attacks on abortion pills will not stop here — the anti-abortion movement sees how critical abortion pills are in this post-Roe world, and they are hell bent on cutting off access,” she added.
Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the national abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, echoed similar feelings. While expressing relief she also said, “This baseless push to block abortion access should never have been heard by them in the first place.”
How this case got to the Supreme Court
The mifepristone case began five months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion opponents initially won a sweeping ruling nearly a year ago from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee in Texas, that would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone, but it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.
The Supreme Court put the appeals court’s modified ruling on hold, then agreed to hear the case, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of the decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that “federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions.”
Kavanaugh was part of the majority to overturn Roe.
A summary of what each side argued in this case
Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.
President Joe Biden’s administration and drug manufacturers had warned that siding with abortion opponents in this case could undermine the FDA’s drug approval process beyond the abortion context by inviting judges to second-guess the agency’s scientific judgments. The Democratic administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone, argued that the drug is among the safest the FDA has ever approved.
The abortion opponents argued in court papers that the FDA’s decisions in 2016 and 2021 to relax restrictions on getting the drug were unreasonable and “jeopardize women’s health across the nation.”
What is Mifepristone?
More than 6 million people have used mifepristone since 2000. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and primes the uterus to respond to the contraction-causing effect of a second drug, misoprostol. The two-drug regimen has been used to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks gestation.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has called the ruling a “major victory for reproductive rights across our nation.”
Unanimous Supreme Court preserves access to widely used abortion medication
The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously preserved access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.
The justices ruled that abortion opponents lacked the legal right to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to ease access to it.
The case had threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.