Mother Jones; Olga Fedorova/SOPA/ZUMA; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/ZUMA; Justin Rex/AP; Tim Mossholder/Unsplash

When far-right activists won their decades-long crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade, they likely expected that eradicating the constitutional right to an abortion would result in the number of abortions plummeting. But two years after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, abortions have actually risen in the US, thanks to medications that now account for almost two-thirds of pregnancy terminations nationwide.

Conceding there were reproductive rights battles yet to be fought, a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors—represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the most powerful religious law firm in the country— launched an audacious attack on the Food and Drug Administration, challenging its regulation of mifepristone, a key component of medication abortions.

Today, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court swatted away that challenge in the case FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The ruling, written by Trump appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held that anti-abortion doctors and groups lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them or their members any direct harm. Read the opinion here.

“Given the broad and comprehensive conscience protections guaranteed by federal law,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “the plaintiffs have not shown—and cannot show—that FDA’s actions will cause them to suffer any conscience injury.”

“Precedents require a plaintiff to demonstrate that the defendant’s challenged actions caused his asserted injuries.”

The ruling was hailed by abortion rights groups, which had seen the case as an existential threat. But the decision doesn’t overturn state laws that have made the abortion pill illegal or imposed restrictions on access. Nor is it likely to slow down other efforts underway to ban the abortion pill around the country, including arguments based on the Victorian-era federal obscenity law known as the Comstock Act.

And it offers little insight into how the court will decide the other blockbuster abortion-related case waiting in the wings this term: Moyle v. United States, an Idaho case that will decide whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care.

The mifepristone decision “keeps medication abortion care safe for now,” said Kirsten Moore, director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project, but she added that dismissing the case based on standing is “a slap on the wrist—anti-abortion extremists will continue trying to put mifepristone back under lock and key.”

“This is a case that never should have reached the nation’s highest court,” Jocelyn C. Frye, President of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said in a statement. “Although this ruling staved off a catastrophic outcome, the threat has been averted temporarily, not erased.”

The case brought together an........

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