Supreme Court Takes Up Abortion Pill Case, Decision Expected Amid 2024 Election
14 Dec 2023
Patent InfringementDrug Approval
Pictured: Front view of the Supreme Court building/iStock, SeanPavonePhoto
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear the legal case regarding the abortion pill mifepristone and how it is currently delivered and distributed. According to several media reports, the high court will hear arguments in the coming months and will likely reach a decision in the summer during the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to hear the case follows an appeal by the Biden administration in response to an August 2023 ruling by a U.S. federal appeals court, which put restrictions on the broad access to mifepristone. At the time, the court found no need to take mifepristone—made by Danco Laboratories—off the market, but disallowed telemedicine prescriptions and its distribution via mail.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre in a statement said that the Biden administration welcomes the Supreme Court’s decision to review a lower court’s verdict on mifepristone, which not only “threatens to undermine the FDA’s scientific, independent judgement” but also “reimpose outdated restrictions on access to safe and effective medical abortion.”
Pierre added that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “remain firmly committed to defending women’s ability to access reproductive care.”
The recent legal tussle over mifepristone runs back to November 2022, when the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—along with other pro-life organizations—filed a lawsuit against the FDA, claiming that the agency “never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use” and that mifepristone’s approval was influenced by politics.
In April 2023, Texas federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and issued a preliminary injunction, blocking the sales of mifepristone. A few days later, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals partly blocked Kacsmaryk’s ruling.
Soon after, the Supreme Court granted the FDA’s application for a stay, which effectively allowed mifepristone to remain on the market while the case has yet to be resolved.
The case was sent back to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where Attorney General Sarah Harrington argued in front of a three-judge panel that Kacsmaryk’s decision undermined the FDA’s scientific expertise. The appellate justices took issue with this line of reasoning and raised doubts about whether the FDA had done its due diligence before expanding access to mifepristone.
Lawrence Gostin, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, on Wednesday wrote in an X posting that “in one fell swoop” the Supreme Court next year “will decide access to the most common abortion method and the functioning of the FDA,” adding that “reproductive freedom is at stake as well as the scientific judgments of health agencies.”
Tristan Manalac is an independent science writer based in Metro Manila, Philippines. He can be reached at tristan@tristanmanalac.com or tristan.manalac@biospace.com.
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