All eyes are on the Supreme Court as it could say at any moment how it will handle a blockbuster medication abortion case that landed on its doorstep late last week.
The Supreme Court is deciding whether to let lower court rulings that would restrict access to a medication abortion drug go into effect. Justice Samuel Alito, who oversees emergency disputes in the region from where the lawsuit arises, has paused those rulings until 11:59 p.m. ET Wednesday. Final briefs in the case were filed overnight going into Wednesday morning.
The case is a challenge to the US Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating mifepristone, the first drug in the two-pill regimen used to terminate pregnancies in medication abortions.
At stake is what kind of access abortion-seekers will have to the drugs, even in states where abortion is widely permitted, as the the lawsuit brought by anti-abortion activists moves forward. The case also raises wide-reaching questions about the authority courts have to second-guess the determinations by FDA experts about a drug’s safety.
Here is what to know about the order the Supreme Court is expected to hand down on Wednesday:
The Supreme Court has been asked by the federal government and a mifepristone manufacturer to put on hold lower court orders changing the FDA’s rules for use of the medication abortion drug.
The justices are reviewing a decision last week from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the FDA to reverse moves it’s made over the last seven years that have made mifepristone easier to obtain. The 5th Circuit said that FDA’s approval of mifepristone could stay in force, as it paused parts of a district court’s order that would have suspended that approval.
Mifepristone’s defenders have argued to the Supreme Court that even the 5th Circuit’s order returning the…
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