US supreme court temporarily restores access to mail-order abortion pills | US supreme court
The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily restored access to mifepristone nationwide, blocking a ruling that threatened to upend the accessibility of an abortion pill implicated in nearly two-thirds of pregnancy terminations across the country.
On Monday, Justice Samuel Alito signed an order staying a ruling by the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals that had placed new limits on the drug. That ruling, issued Friday, called for preventing abortion providers from prescribing mifepristone by mail.
Friday’s restrictions came from a panel of three conservative judges at a New Orleans appellate courthouse, widely considered one of the most conservative in the United States. The committee’s decision follows a lawsuit filed by the Louisiana state government against the Food and Drug Administration, arguing that postal distribution of drugs ignores potential health risks and allows patients to circumvent abortion bans.
Mifepristone is taken with misoprostol as part of a two-drug regimen that decades of research has demonstrated to be safe and effective.
In response to the appeals court’s ruling, Danco Laboratories — one of the drug’s manufacturers — filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday. The company asked the justices to end the restrictions, warning that the lower court’s ruling “injects immediate confusion and upheaval into very urgent medical decisions” and would cause “chaos.”
Alito said his order would remain in effect until at least 5 p.m. ET on May 11. He gave Louisiana until 5 p.m. ET Thursday to respond to efforts to block the appeals court ruling.
In response to the temporary pause, Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the abortion rights group Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said: “As access to mifepristone returns to where it was Friday morning, the whiplash and chaos that patients and providers face has already had real consequences on the lives and futures of real people. »
Similarly, Julia Kaye, senior attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said, “While this is a positive development in the short term, no one can rest easy when our ability to obtain this safe and effective medication for abortion and miscarriage care is still at stake.”
“The Supreme Court must end this baseless attack on our reproductive freedom once and for all. »
Alito’s Monday order and the appeals court’s decision three days earlier follow the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection in 2024 of a challenge to access to mifepristone. This was seen as a major victory for reproductive rights advocates after the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the federal right to abortion previously established by Roe v. Wade.
