The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that people in all states can continue to access a key abortion medication through the mail. The ruling lasts indefinitely while an anti-abortion lawsuit continues.
This is the latest development in a case Louisiana filed last year against the Food and Drug Administration, claiming that the availability of mifepristone via telehealth undermines that state’s abortion ban.
After the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, 13 states enforced total abortion bans. Paradoxically, abortions across the U.S. increased since then, and states have sought other ways to mitigate the number of abortions taking place.
Through a series of rulings over the past two weeks, access to mifepristone has been restricted and expanded several times:
On May 1, a lower federal court granted Louisiana’s request and rolled back telemedicine access to mifepristone. On May 4, the Supreme Court put that ruling on hold for one week, through an “administrative stay,” allowing telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone to continue. On Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily extended full access to mifepristone through Thursday. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that full access to the drug would continue for the duration of the lawsuit.While there is no way to know how the case will turn out, it’s meaningful that the nation’s highest court made a substantive decision, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion historian at the University of California Davis. In maintaining access to the medication, the court sided with the drug’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, which appealed the ruling that would require patients to see a doctor in person to receive mifepristone.
“It means the court to some extent must think that Danco et al have a good argument,” Ziegler said. “But we have absolutely no idea why, because they didn’t say anything.”
The consequences of the case will be felt by Mississippians “in a really, really big way,” Ziegler said. In 2023, two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. were medication abortions.
Medication accounts for 100% of abortions in Mississippi, which has a near-total abortion ban, Ziegler said. Each month, anywhere from 200 to more than 600 Mississippians use these drugs to terminate a pregnancy, according to research published by KFF.
For now, the high court’s decision allows providers and patients to resume the status quo — an “urgently needed relief after weeks of disruption,” Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy organization, said in a press release. “But we are not fully celebrating yet, since this baseless litigation will continue in lower courts and other threats to mifepristone and abortion access overall loom large.”
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