Pro-life advocates, including JDFI, are disappointed in the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision to preserve, for now, continued access to the abortion pill mifepristone. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the decision.
The Supreme Court was considering the issue because on April 7 two separate U.S. district courts issued contradictory opinions. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, in Amarillo, Texas, ordered the suspension of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of the drug. Judge Kacsmaryk said the FDA had not sufficiently examined the drug's long-term health impact on women. U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice, based in Spokane, Washington, ruled that the pill must remain available in the 15 states and the District of Columbia that sued to protect access to the abortion pill.
When the Biden administration appealed Judge Kacsmaryk's decision, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked his decision on the FDA's approval of the drug, while upholding the suspension of dispensing the drug by mail. At that point, the Biden administration appealed the case to the Supreme Court, leading to the disappointing 7-2 ruling.
Of course, this is the same Supreme Court that boldly, in June of 2022, finally ended the complete legal fiction that there was a constitutional right to abortion "hidden" in our founding document. That decision is already saving the lives of thousands of unborn children. It also resulted in the Biden administration "doubling down" on promoting more abortion. The administration even established a special intra-agency working group to prevent the decline of the number of abortions in America.
For now, the Supreme Court has eliminated the restrictions on the abortion-inducing drug until the controversy over whether the FDA followed the correct procedures works its way through the judiciary.
Our friends at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is leading the legal charge against the FDA's approval of the abortion pill, said Friday that the Supreme Court was maintaining "the status quo that existed prior to our lawsuit while our challenge . . . moves forward."