The Supreme Court has ruled that a group of anti-abortion doctors have no legal basis to challenge access to mifepristone, one of the two most common medications used in medical abortion.
The majority opinion did not address the underlying regulatory or safety issues raised by the plaintiffs and instead decided the case solely on the basis of standing. As a result, access to mifepristone will not change.
The medicine will remain available to people until they are 10th week of pregnancy, and will still be available by mail.
The justices concluded that the conservative doctors in the lawsuit had not demonstrated that they had been personally harmed by the government’s actions to regulate mifepristone.
Still, mifepristone remains illegal in more than a dozen states that prohibit abortion.
The case centered on the question of whether federal regulators overstepped their authority by loosening restrictions to facilitate access to mifepristone.
These changes included increasing the gestational age at which mifepristone can be used up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, allowing the medication to be shipped to patients, reducing dosage, allowing telehealth prescribing, and allowing providers other than doctors to prescribe the medicine.
Since the Supreme Court struck down the nation’s right to abortion in 2022, more people have been using medication to terminate pregnancies. Medication abortion accounted for 63% of all abortions in the formal healthcare system in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research group.
Anti-abortion groups indicated the decision was only a temporary setback and are confident they can find another way to challenge drugs.
For example, the same Texas district court that originally ruled against the FDA said a group of red states led by Missouri could intervene in the lawsuit.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
