Justice Samuel Alito handed down a short and confusing order about an abortion lawsuit on Wednesday, which briefly extends a different order he handed down last Friday.
The Friday order paused lower courts’ orders that severely restricted access to the abortion drug mifepristone until Wednesday, so that the justices could have time to consider whether to sign on to this attempt to ban the medication. The new order extends that pause by two days, until midnight on Friday, April 21.
The upshot of this new order is that mifepristone remains fully legal in states that do not ban abortion, at least until Alito’s new order expires.
It is unclear why the justices need another two days to ponder this case, which is known as FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, as the plaintiffs’ arguments in favor of banning mifepristone are wholly without merit. But this has been a maximally chaotic case over the past two weeks — and that confusion will now last at least two more days.
How we got here, explained as best we can
The plaintiffs in this case ask the Supreme Court to second-guess the Food and Drug Administration’s scientific judgment that mifepristone is safe to be marketed within the United States, something the Court is not allowed to do.
Additionally, no federal court has jurisdiction to hear this case. Before any federal court may hear any lawsuit challenging a federal policy, the plaintiffs must show they’ve been injured in some way by that policy — a requirement known as “standing.” Moreover, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International (2013), the Hippocratic Medicine plaintiffs must show that they will be injured in the future unless access to mifepristone is blocked, and that this future injury is “certainly impending.”
But these plaintiffs do not raise an even remotely plausible claim that they have standing. Their primary argument is that, if mifepristone stays on the market, patients who were…
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