Red States Are Doing What Trump Won’t: Going After Abortion Pills in Court |
When the US Supreme Court unanimously blocked a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 over the agency’s regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone, conservatives were disappointed but undeterred. The justices ruled that anti-abortion doctors didn’t have standing to sue. But in a hopeful sign for those opposed to abortion, they left the courthouse doors open to other parties who might be able to make a more convincing case.
Louisiana eagerly took up the challenge. On Tuesday, that lawsuit—another potential blockbuster—has its first major test, when lawyers for the state and a woman who says she was coerced into having an abortion by an ex-boyfriend will try to persuade a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction against FDA rules that allow abortion pills to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail.
The case is part of an increasingly urgent—and panicked—anti-abortion campaign to make abortion pills much harder to obtain, not just in Louisiana but nationwide. “Telemedicine has been a game changer for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which is exactly why Louisiana wants to eliminate it,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “They see what a lifeline abortion pills have become—especially for people in states that ban abortion—and they want to squash it.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has asked the judge to halt the proceedings until the FDA finishes a review of mifepristone’s safety that it launched last fall. The Louisiana case “threatens to short-circuit” that study, Department of Justice lawyers contend.
Louisiana bans abortions with almost no exceptions, classifies mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” But nearly four years after Roe was overturned in June 2022, out-of-state abortion providers are mailing hundreds of boxes of abortion pills to Louisiana patients every month. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill blames this state of affairs on a rule change by the Biden administration that permanently ended the FDA’s requirement for in-person dispensing of mifepristone.
“Telemedicine has been a game changer for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which is exactly why Louisiana wants to eliminate it.”
The 2023 rule change was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political,” Murrill claims, pointing to an executive order by President Joe Biden after the Dobbs decision that directed his administration to “identify all ways to ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” She says the rule change exceeded Biden’s authority and violates the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment.
Echoing the claims of abortion opponents going back to the 1980s, Murrill insists abortion pills are too dangerous to be prescribed to women under any circumstances, much less remotely. Fact check: Scores of studies from around the globe have shown that mifepristone is safe and effective.
Murrill also argues that telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. That’s what Murrill’s co-plaintiff in the case, a Louisiana woman named........