The group of pro-life doctors having their challenge to the abortion pill heard before the Supreme Court next month filed their brief Thursday, telling the justices the Biden administration’s lifting of certain safeguards for women runs afoul of federal law.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the group representing pro-life medical professionals, said in its filing that their clients have had to treat women in emergency rooms due to complications from taking the abortion pill and that the drug should only be dispensed with supervision — a rule that the Food and Drug Administration moved to limit.
The abortion pill has been available for at least two decades, but in recent years the FDA has moved to reduce the number of in-person doctor visits women would need to obtain the pill and alter the gestation period for which it could be dispensed.
“Giving such unfettered power to FDA — an agency whose actions ‘affect every citizen,’ — is particularly problematic. Turning a blind eye to FDA’s patently unreasonable actions here, which jeopardize women’s health throughout the nation, would be unprecedented,” the group argued in its brief.
The doctors are asking the Supreme Court to hold that the FDA’s actions ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act and to affirm a lower court ruling in their favor.
Specifically, the justices will weigh the legality of the drug mifepristone — setting up a major abortion-related showdown following the upending of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The cases are Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance Hippocratic Medicine. They’ll be heard on March 26 with a decision expected by the end of June.
The FDA’s case is one of the most closely watched battles from the Justice Department, which appealed a lower court ruling restricting the use of mifepristone.
The district court had ruled the drug should not have had FDA approval at all but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not go that far. Instead, the appeals panel said the drug could still be dispensed but not through the mail as regulators had begun to allow in 2016, and only up to seven weeks into pregnancy.
The justices will consider how long the pill can be prescribed during pregnancy and whether it can be mailed as federal officials had proposed in recent administrative changes.
However, the court rejected another case from the group of pro-life doctors asking the justices to review the pill’s initial FDA approval two decades ago.
The drug was approved in 2000 for up to seven weeks of pregnancy, but its administration required three steps: first, a visit with a doctor to receive mifepristone, then another one to get the drug misoprostol and finally a follow-up to address complications.
The high court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a national right to abortion, returning jurisdiction on the procedure to the states. Since then, roughly 14 states have moved to ban the procedure other than to save the life of the mother. A handful of states have moved to ban it after six to 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The pill has remained available during the appellate process after the Supreme Court placed the lower court ruling on hold.
Danco Laboratories, a producer of mifepristone, also petitioned the high court over its production of the pill, challenging the lower court’s restrictions on its distribution.
Mifepristone, approved by the FDA during the Clinton administration, is used with misoprostol to terminate a pregnancy.
The abortion pill accounts for more than half of abortions in the United States and more than 5 million women have used it since 2000, according to The Associated Press.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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