From the jump, the lawsuit challenging the legality of mifepristone was a cynical, propagandistic endeavor. In a 9-0 opinion, the Supreme Court threw it out.
In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s 24-year-old approval of mifepristone, a common gynecological drug also used for medication abortion, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to bring the suit in the first place. The ruling keeps mifepristone legal across the country — at least for now.
Under the Constitution, a plaintiff must be suffering some concrete injury to bring a federal lawsuit. In the mifepristone case — FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — the suit was brought by a collection of anti-abortion advocates, some of them doctors, who neither provide abortion care nor prescribe mifepristone. Nonetheless, they claimed that somehow, someday they may be forced to treat a patient suffering complications from taking mifepristone, which they said granted them the right to sue.
The Supreme Court didn’t buy it. “The plaintiffs do not prescribe or use mifepristone,” and the FDA approval doesn’t require them to do so, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court. “Rather, the plaintiffs want FDA to make mifepristone more difficult for other doctors to prescribe and for pregnant women to obtain.” Their desire to make the drug “less available for others does not establish standing to sue.”
