On Thursday, June 13, 2024, in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that pro-life doctors did not have standing to challenge the FDA’s regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone.

Anyone listening to oral arguments in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in March won’t be surprised by the ruling. Many of the justices, including those who overruled Roe two years ago, expressed concern regarding the doctors’ standing to sue.

Standing is the legal requirement a suing party must show to litigate the underlying issue in a matter. Without standing, courts will not consider the merits of a lawsuit.

To have standing, the law requires that the doctors show that they were harmed, that the harm resulted from the FDA’s actions, and that their injury could have been remedied with a favorable court decision.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote decisively in the Court’s opinion, “Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue. Nor do the plaintiff’s other standing theories suffice.”

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the public interest law firm representing the doctors argued that they would be forced to violate their consciences and perform abortions on women who were suffering injuries from the abortion pill.

Long-suffering cake artist Jack Phillips appeared before the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday defending his right to free speech.

The court heard oral arguments over whether Phillips can be compelled by the state of Colorado to bake a custom cake — pink on the inside and blue on the outside — to celebrate and symbolize a “gender transition” from male to female.

Jack has been in court for over a decade seeking to have his First Amendment rights upheld. This is his third case — also known as Masterpiece III.

Masterpiece I stemmed from Phillips’ refusal to create a custom-designed cake for a same-sex wedding. He won the case at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, when seven justices ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had violated Phillips’ right to freely exercise his religion.

On the same day the Supreme Court announced it would hear Phillips’ first case, Autumn Scardina — a “transgender” activist lawyer — called Phillips’ shop requesting that he create the custom pink-and-blue cake to celebrate his “gender transition.” Phillips politely declined because he cannot express those messages “for anyone.”

When Jack declined to make the “transgender cake,” Scardina filed a complaint against Jack with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission — the same group that had previously compared Jack’s Christian beliefs to those of slaveowners and Nazis. The case, Masterpiece II, was later dropped after Jack countersued the Commission for harassing him.

Social media platforms should come with a surgeon general’s warning, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in The New York Times today, illustrating government’s waning tolerance for social media’s deleterious effect on children.

The Audience
A surgeon general’s warning, like those plastered on cigarette cartons, can’t be issued without Congress’ approval. Murthy wrote his opinion to convince congresspeople to pull the trigger on a social media warning.

The Argument
Murthy isolates social media as an “important contributor” to the “mental health crisis among young people,” and suggests a warning could lower its presence in young people’s lives.

“Evidence from tobacco studies show warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior,” he writes, further arguing such cautions would encourage parents to limit their child’s time online.

Murthy envisions a surgeon general’s warning on social media as one of many congressional policies aimed at making social media safer, including legislation to:

• Protect kids from exploitation, abuse and inappropriate content.
• Inhibit some of social media’s habit-forming features, including infinite scroll and autoplay.
• Stop social media companies from collecting kids’ data, which can be used to create more addictive algorithms.

Delegates at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a resolution on Wednesday affirming the dignity of preborn life — and condemning the reckless, careless, and widespread destruction of human embryos by countless fertility clinics.

Written and proposed by Southern Seminary President Dr. Al Mohler and Andrew Walker, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the statement does not call for an outright ban on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

IVF is a procedure that involves fertilizing a woman’s eggs with a man’s sperm outside the body in a laboratory — and then implanting the embryos back in the mother after a number of days.

Instead, the SBC resolution shines a bright and important light on the many ways the technology is being abused to ultimately commodify and create children who are killed or frozen in perpetuity.

“On the Ethical Realities of Reproductive Technologies and the Dignity of the Human Embryo,” the Mohler/Walker resolution makes numerous strong statements, including that,

“Though all children are to be fully respected and protected, not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified.”

In voting to pass the resolution, Southern Baptist delegates reaffirmed “the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage …”