In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the agency’s approval of mifepristone, a pill used in more than 60 percent of abortions, because the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. Rejection of their claims is hardly evidence that the court is keeping its promise, in overturning Roe v. Wade, to leave the abortion question to the people and their elected representatives. To the contrary: The court’s decision in Alliance offers a road map for conservatives who want to challenge mifepristone access in politics and through the courts.

There were problems with AHM’s case for standing from the beginning. The doctors who sued the Food and Drug Administration relied on a mixture of speculation and self-inflicted harms—perhaps the most ludicrous argument was that the plaintiffs had standing because they diverted resources to pay for their suit against mifepristone. The cost of suing, they argued, proved their standing to sue. The court’s decision to reject such claims is welcome, but it’s hardly an assurance that the justices will stay out of the abortion debate.

The decision rejecting standing still allows the anti-abortion movement to renew its challenges to the FDA’s authority, continue its efforts to reinvent the 19th-century Comstock Act as a national ban on abortion, and employ conscience objections to block access to health care, as a prominent conservative commentator points out.

Critically, in rejecting the plaintiffs’ standing claim, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion for the court discusses federal conscience protections more expansively than SCOTUS has before. Health care refusals can harm other citizens in ways that traditional conscience objections involving religious observance or dress do not. These conscience claims can injure, for example, if an emergency room doctor—or attendant—objects: “I do not want to care for this patient because she might have had an abortion.” Ominously,........

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