The Supreme Court has taken its first action in a fierce legal battle over banning an abortion pill that has been available for more than two decades.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominated to the court by former President Donald Trump, ruled in favor of an anti-abortion group’s lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this month.
The ruling, which rescinded the FDA’s year 2000 approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, was shifted to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and partially overturned this week.
The narrowed version of Kacsmaryk’s decision had been set to go into effect on Friday. However, conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary stay on the same day, blocking the ruling entirely until Wednesday.
Alito’s temporary stay was a procedural move that does not indicate how the case will eventually be decided by the full Supreme Court, which notably overturned the landmark 1973 abortion rights case Roe v. Wade last year.
The FDA declined comment on Alito’s stay when contacted by Newsweek.
“This stay is the bare minimum,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the pro-abortion rights group Women’s March, said in a statement obtained by Newsweek. “The imminent threat to access to mifepristone and abortion care remains.”
“Mifepristone has been safe and effective and proven that way for more than 20 years,” Carmona continued. “There is no doubt about the FDA’s authority to regulate it, or that the drug helps save lives.”
Lawyers for the anti-abortion organization that filed the suit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, argued that the FDA ignored safety issues concerning mifepristone, particularly involving minors, when approving the drug.
However, research conducted in the decades since the drug was approved suggests that it poses few serious safety concerns and is likely safer than the popular erectile dysfunction drug Viagra.
Some medical experts have suggested that the ruling by Kacsmaryk, who was nominated to the bench amid a controversy about his outspoken views against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, was politically motivated.
“This decision is not based in medicine or science—it’s based in political ideology,” Dr. Smita Carroll, an OB-GYN in New Mexico and a Physicians for Reproductive Health fellow, told Newsweek this month.
“Mifepristone is an exceptionally safe medication, as is the process of a medication abortion,” Carroll added. “We know that it’s a safe and effective way to manage medication abortion.”
While the Supreme Court will decide the ultimate fate of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, a federal judge in Washington state complicated matters by issuing his own ruling that ordered the FDA to keep the drug available.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—blocked the FDA from taking “any action to remove mifepristone from the market or otherwise cause the drug to become less available.”
On Thursday, Rice issued a ruling to also block the Fifth Circuit’s decision, which overturned the bulk of Kacsmaryk’s ruling while imposing restrictions like requiring mifepristone to be disbursed in person and limiting its use to the first seven weeks of gestation.
Rice’s latest ruling, which could also be appealed to the Supreme Court, blocks the FDA from suspending access to mifepristone in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Mifepristone is often taken in conjunction with the drug misoprostol, which is not facing the prospect of a federal ban and is capable of inducing abortions by itself, although with more side effects.
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