Supreme Court unlikely to limit access to abortion pill

From Staff Reports
From – https://www.phillytrib.com/
Reprinted – by Texas Metro News

The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed unlikely to limit access to mifepristone, a key medication used in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions and first approved more than two decades ago.

A majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed skepticism that the antiabortion doctors challenging the government’s loosening of regulations have sufficient legal grounds – or standing – to bring the lawsuit.

During oral argument, the government and the drug company that makes the medication emphasized the safety of the drug but also focused much of their arguments on standing.

Erin Hawley, lawyer for Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, argued that mifepristone is dangerous, even though multiple studies have shown it to be overwhelmingly safe. She says that if complications emerge from medication abortions, antiabortion doctors are forced to choose between helping a woman with a life-threatening condition and violating their conscience. Hawley also said that the risks of complications go up without an in-person doctor visit. Leading studies say the opposite, include one major study published last month in Nature Medicine.

Several justices, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson, suggested that the court could issue a narrow ruling that stops short of a nationwide rollback of regulations that have made it easier for patients to access mifepristone, including through the mail.

The toughest questions for the Biden administration and the drug manufacturer came from the court’s two most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito pressed the lawyer for the drug manufacturer: “Do you think the FDA is infallible?”

Jackson said she worried that “there is a significant mismatch in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that’s being sought,” saying that the “obvious, common sense remedy” would be to provide doctors who object to abortion with an exemption so they don’t have to participate in the procedure. The plaintiffs, however, are “seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all.”

The justices are examining rule changes in 2016 and 2021 that, among other things, made the drug available by mail and from a medical provider other than a doctor.