The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case involving a commonly used abortion pill, mifepristone, and the FDA’s recent actions to make it more accessible.
The Supreme Court is set to convene Tuesday to hear arguments in a and recent actions by the Food and Drug Administration to make the medication easier to obtain.
At the center of the legal battle is the pill mifepristone, which is taken along with another drug to terminate an early pregnancy. Approved by the FDA in 2000, more than 5 million patients have taken mifepristone, according to the agency, and studies cited in court filings have shown it is safe and effective.
In recent years, the FDA has taken a series of steps to make mifepristone more accessible, including allowing it to be taken up to 10 weeks into pregnancy and delivered through the mail without an in-person doctor’s visit. Those actions, taken in 2016 and 2021, have come under legal scrutiny after a group of anti-abortion rights doctors and medical associations claimed the FDA violated the law when it relaxed the rules.
The Supreme Court is set to review a that found the agency’s actions were unlawful. A ruling unwinding those changes would threaten to curtail access to mifepristone nationwide, even in states with laws protecting abortion access.
Access to mifepristone has remained unchanged while legal proceedings in the case have continued, since the high court issued an order last April . That relief will remain in place until the Supreme Court hands down its decision, expected by the end of June.
Arguments in the case are taking place less than two years after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 to and return the issue to the states. And the dispute is not the only one involving abortion that the justices will consider within the next month — a involves whether federal law requires emergency room doctors in states that ban abortion to perform the procedure on pregnant patients whose lives are at risk.
The court’s consideration also comes on the heels of new findings that medication abortions in the U.S. have risen since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A study published Monday in the medical journal JAMA found that the number of self-managed abortions obtained using pills grew in the six months after the high court reversed Roe. Research from the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that supports abortion rights, published last week showed that medication abortions accounted for 63% of all abortions that took place within the U.S. health care system in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.The dispute over mifepristone
The challenge to the FDA’s efforts surrounding mifepristone was filed in November 2022 — more than two decades after the drug was made available in the U.S. — by a group of medical associations that oppose abortion rights. Brought in federal district court in Texas, the groups, led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, challenged the FDA’s initial 2000 approval and its more recent changes in 2016 and 2021.
