Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Abortion Medication Restriction on Legal Standing

There are other cases similar to this in the pipeline coming, but for now the Supreme Court has rejected a challenge against the widely used abortion drug mifepristone citing a lack of standing by the plaintiffs.

Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to limit access to a widely used abortion medication, rejecting a challenge from antiabortion doctors two years after the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade on procedural grounds.

In a unanimous ruling, the court sided with the Biden administration and the manufacturer of mifepristone and reversed a lower court decision that would have made it more difficult to obtain the drug used in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions. The ruling was not on the substance of the case, but on a procedural ruling that the plaintiffs did not have legal grounds to bring the case.

Writing for the court, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the antiabortion doctors who brought the challenge do not prescribe or use mifepristone, and the FDA’s relaxed regulation of the medication does not require those doctors to do or refrain from doing anything.

“Rather, the plaintiffs want FDA to make mifepristone more difficult for other doctors to prescribe and for pregnant women to obtain,” Kavanaugh wrote. Under the Constitution, he added, a group’s “desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue.

Ever since the high court eliminated the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, medications to terminate pregnancy have grown in importance and become a major target of litigation, in part because the pills can be sent by mail, including to states that have severely limited or banned abortions.

The justices were reviewing a decision from the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that said that the Food and Drug Administration failed to follow proper procedures or thoroughly explain its reasoning when it loosened regulations for obtaining mifepristone in 2016 and 2021.