WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will review the federal government’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, setting up a ruling that could have drastic ramifications for the Biden administration’s ongoing efforts to circumvent state pro-life laws.
In December 2021, the Biden administration’s U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) eliminated its requirement that abortion pills be dispensed in person, allowing pharmacists to instead send them through the mail as long as the recipient has a prescription. Representing a handful of doctors and groups including Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sued, securing in April a suspension of the policy from a U.S. District Court judge. That same month, the Supreme Court agreed to halt enforcement of that suspension, ensuring abortion pills would remain available nationwide while the case moved through the courts.
In August, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a split ruling that sided with the FDA on some aspects of the case, including the abortion drug mifepristone’s original 2000 approval, but ultimately agreed to stay the agency’s more recent actions, meaning abortion pills could no longer be sent through the mail at least for the duration of the case, and that the cutoff point for taking abortion pills was moved back from 10 weeks’ gestation to seven weeks. The ruling also restored other conditions, including in-person office visits, prohibition of prescriptions by non-physicians, and mandatory reporting of non-fatal adverse events.
On Wednesday, the nation’s highest court announced that it will review the August ruling, Axios reports, potentially setting up oral arguments next spring and a decision before the critical 2024 elections, which will determine whether Democrats amass enough power to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law.
Evidence shows that abortion pills carry specific risks for the mothers who take them (on top of being lethal to their preborn children), especially when the standards for taking them continue to be relaxed.
A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
Pro-lifers warn that with the Biden administration completely eliminating requirements that abortion pills be taken under any medical supervision or with medical support close by, those events are certain to increase.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
Yet the White House and the abortion lobby have determined that, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year allowing states to directly ban abortion for the first time in half a century, easy distribution of abortion pills across state lines is one of their most potent tactics for preserving abortion “access.”
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol.