Republicans refocus on banning the abortion pill

Since the end of Roe. v. Wade, the abortion drug mifepristone has increasingly become a point of friction between pro-life and pro-choice advocates. Four months after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to overturn changes by the Food and Drug Administration that made the drug more widely available, a group of conservative states is once again trying to bring the issue before the courts.

Abortion pills are back on the chopping block

The attorneys general of three GOP-led states — Missouri, Idaho and Kansas — have banded together to revive and file a new lawsuit against the FDA. The suit hopes to undo several regulatory changes made by the agency since 2016, which have significantly expanded access to mifepristone. The states claim they have standing to sue because the FDA’s actions violate the state. abortion laws by “enabling an out-of-state abortion drug distribution network.” In addition to certain points taken from the first case, the new lawsuit also seeks to prohibit the administration of drugs to anyone under the age of 18. He also wants to curb the “rapidly growing practice of prescribing abortion pills via telemedicine and sending them by mail.” to patients”, including states banning abortion, said The New York Times.

The original trialwhich was filed in 2022 by anti-abortion doctors and groups, was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court in 2022. The court ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the FDA because they “do not prescribe or use mifepristone” themselves. themselves and were instead trying to regulate the actions of others, the judge said. Brett Kavanaugh said in the court’s opinion in the case. Last year, Missouri, Idaho and Kansas asked to join the lawsuit in lower courts and were granted intervenor status. After the court dismissed the original case, they filed an amended complaint as plaintiffs.

Subscribe to The week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple angles.

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE

Subscribe to free weekly newsletters

From our morning news briefing to our weekly Good News newsletter, get the best of the week delivered straight to your inbox.

The attorneys general also argued that mailing abortion pills violated the Comstock Act, a “decades-dormant 19th-century law that prohibits the mailing of anything related to abortion.” , declared Forbes. If they can convince the court to agree, the ruling could “help abortion rights advocates use this law to ban abortion more broadly.” The law prohibits not only the mailing of pills but also any abortion-related material. This was seen as a “potential way for Republicans to ban abortion without imposing a federal ban” because it would make it “largely impossible to perform the procedure.”

States may have a slight advantage over the original plaintiffs in terms of their standing to sue the FDA. Still, their ability to sue and claim that the FDA is harming them could face significant challenges, David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told the Times. It’s also questionable whether the states filed their request in the same court where the original class was dismissed. “This is a purely political, judge-hunting ploy,” Cohen said. If Missouri, Idaho and Kansas “are truly harmed by these pills,” they should file a lawsuit in their states. But they want to appear before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, so they can “rely on this lawsuit that had no merit to begin with, and should not be allowed to proceed.”

It’s ironic that the state’s invocation of the Comstock Act “represents a deliberate effort to subvert its sovereign authority over abortion,” Shoshanna Ehrlich said at a news conference. Ms. Magazine. In doing so, they are “appealing to the power of federal law to prohibit access to medication abortion in states where abortion is legal – thereby subverting their sovereign authority.” The right’s “fierce post-Dobbs crusade” to block access to abortion “represents a state power grab to force pregnant women, including teenagers, to have children by legal decree “.