Abortion medication in America: News and updates

For 49 years after Roe v. Wade, Americans had the right to obtain an abortion if they became pregnant. Then, two years ago, with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court put an end to it.

The Biden administration and some blue states — supported by a network of nonprofits focused on reproductive care — aggressively sought to compensate, while many red states enacted near-total bans on abortion.

A series of legal challenges working their way through the federal courts and now taken up by the Supreme Court has raised questions about the future of access to mifepristone, an abortion medication that is used in more than half of all US abortions with high effectiveness and few severe side effects.

Mifepristone is the first of two drugs usually prescribed together to induce an abortion. The second, misoprostol, however, can be used to terminate a pregnancy on its own. The fate of mifepristone has been in limbo since April, and abortion providers have since scrambled to prepare for a new set of logistics and side effects that might accompany misoprostol-only abortion — all while evaluating the legal risks of providing a medication that is now sure to face increased scrutiny.

It’s been one year since the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that there was no constitutional right to an abortion in the US — a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and 49 years of precedent.

Since then, states have moved to restrict abortion rights. People seeking to end pregnancies across a wide geographic swath of America have wholly or nearly lost the right to do so. Doctors have said that the restrictions endanger their ability to care for patients. New battlegrounds have emerged over medication abortion, the most common form of abortion in the United States. And abortion, always a contentious political and social issue, has become a defining issue in national politics.

The Supreme Court handed down a brief order on Friday in Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a lawsuit asking the federal judiciary to effectively ban mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all abortions in the United States.

The most immediate impact of the Court’s new order is that the justices voted to stay lower court decisions that would have cut off access to mifepristone, at least for the time being. That means that mifepristone remains available, and that patients who live in states where abortion is legal may still obtain the drug in the same way they would have obtained it if this lawsuit had never been filed.

Justice Samuel Alito handed down a brief order Friday that temporarily hits pause on a high-profile lawsuit seeking to ban mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all abortions in the United States. The most immediate upshot of this order is that mifepristone remains legal and fully available — for now.

Alito’s order, known as an administrative stay, does not necessarily mean that the very conservative Supreme Court will resist the temptation to ban mifepristone. Appellate courts often issue such administrative stays in order to buy themselves time to fully consider the case, without being forced to rush because of an arbitrary deadline.

Federal judges in Texas and Washington handed down two opposing rulings on the abortion pill mifepristone on Friday, jeopardizing access to the drug and putting the US Food and Drug Administration in an impossible situation.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative federal district court judge in Texas, issued a long-awaited ruling Friday evening calling for the FDA to stay its approval of mifepristone, which has been deemed safe and legal for 23 years, while Thomas Rice, a federal court judge in Washington state, swiftly issued a directly contradictory decision.

If you’ve followed the fight over where and whether abortion should remain legal in the United States, you’ve probably heard the name “Matthew Kacsmaryk.”

Kacsmaryk is a former lawyer for a religious right law firm, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump to a federal court in Texas. On Friday, he issued a decision ordering the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of mifepristone, a medication used in more than half of all abortions within the United States.