The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it will give a full hearing to a long-simmering dispute over whether far-right federal courts may ban the abortion drug mifepristone.
Mifepristone is part of a two-drug treatment that causes the uterus to expel pregnancy tissue. This two-drug regime, which may be taken up to the 70th day of a pregnancy, is often a safer alternative than surgical abortion — and it is also a less invasive procedure. More than half of all US abortions are medication abortions, which use mifepristone.
The Court’s decision to hear two consolidated cases, known as FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, is unsurprising, as it has already weighed in on this case once. And the Court’s previous actions suggest that most of the justices are unlikely to allow a court-imposed mifepristone ban to stand.
But while the Court seems likely to decide that judges shouldn’t be allowed to upend the nationwide availability of a common drug, the fact that these cases are once again before the Court is a reminder of just how broken the federal judiciary is.
In April 2023, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee closely affiliated with the Christian right and a longtime crusader against abortion, birth control, and many forms of human sexuality — attempted to ban mifepristone by suspending its regulatory approval. The Supreme Court halted Kacsmaryk’s order and determined that the medication, which has been legal in the United States since 2000, should remain lawful while this case worked its way through the appellate process.
Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a far-right court dominated by MAGA stalwarts, and a panel of that court also voted to heavily restrict mifepristone in August 2023 (though that decision never took effect because of the Supreme Court’s previous intervention in this case).
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