Dear John,
This past Thursday, in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Supreme Court ruled to strike down a challenge to the FDA’s approval of the abortion medication mifepristone and subsequent regulations. As contributing editor Carrie Baker writes, “… a unanimous Court ruled the anti-abortion plaintiffs did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they were not harmed ...”
This means that the medication—which is safe and effective and has been used in abortions around the world for more than 30 years—can remain available. It was a narrow decision: as Baker explains: “The Court did not address the merits of the case, including whether the FDA had adequate scientific support for loosening restrictions on mifepristone in 2016 and 2021 and whether allowing telemedicine abortion and mailing of abortion pills violated a nineteenth-century anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act.”
This ruling is a relief for reproductive rights advocates and women and girls across the U.S., but as advocates and leading medical and scientific experts pointed out the fact that the case ended up before the Court in the first place is of grave concern. “A case based on junk science that would undermine public health should never have been brought in front of the court,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health Institute at UCSF.“Decades of evidence demonstrate that medication abortion is safe and effective, and any attempt to restrict access is unscientific.”
Now we await the Court’s ruling in a second abortion case, involving whether states with severe abortion bans, like Texas and Idaho, can ignore the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act that requires hospitals to provide whatever emergency medical treatment is necessary to stabilize a patient, including an abortion.
Because these states ban abortions almost entirely—the only exception being cases when a woman’s life is at stake, but not in cases where abortion is necessary to preserve her health—emergency room physicians have to wait as a matter of law until a patient’s condition deteriorates to the point where she faces imminent death before they can provide the necessary care to stabilize her. Doctors face prison time should they defy the state’s ban.
This is not an academic debate.
Increasingly, women are presenting at hospital emergency rooms actively miscarrying and being denied surgical procedures or medication for treatment; women whose fetus has been diagnosed with a fatal condition and women with severe pregnancy complications are routinely denied abortion care, jeopardizing their health—and in some cases, their lives. Maternal mortality rates, already a crisis in Black communities, are worsening in states with strict abortion bans.
Also this week, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate navigated dueling proposed bills around IVF in the wake of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that could restrict access to the fertility treatment, with Republicans overwhelming voting to block a bill that would guarantee access to IVF. And in the House, Republicans added an amendment to the must pass FY25 National Defense Authorization Act to end a Department of Defense policy allowing service members and their dependents to be reimbursed for travel expenses if they must travel for abortion care.
As the ongoing battles over abortion access, IVF, Title IX, and more show us, our rights are under increasing attack and are far from secure. You can count on Ms. to keep you informed as the fight for equality continues.
Onward!
