Pro-life organizations called the Supreme Court’s Thursday abortion pill decision “deeply disappointing,” but vowed to continue the fight against the Biden administration’s deregulation of mifepristone, the first drug used in a two-drug medication abortion regimen.
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision holding that pro-life doctors lack standing to challenge the The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2016 and 2021 actions relaxing regulatory access to mifepristone, although the decision did not decide whether the FDA’s actions were illegal. The states of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho, who sued over the FDA’s actions in a lower court, may bring their own challenges to the abortion pill mandate, as the Supreme Court’s decision left open the possibility that others — perhaps states — might have standing to sue.
“We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s lawless removal of commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley said in part. “[But] we are grateful that three states stand ready to hold the FDA accountable for jeopardizing the health and safety of women and girls across this country.”
BREAKING: SCOTUS’s ruling on our case against the FDA will allow the FDA to continue to endanger women’s health for now.
While we’re disappointed the Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s unlawful actions, nothing in today’s decision changes this fact: women and girls are…
— Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) June 13, 2024
Ingrid Skop, a board-certified OB-GYN who serves as vice president and director of medical affairs at Charlotte Lozier Institute, called the decision “deeply disappointing:”
It is deeply disappointing that the FDA was not held accountable today for its reckless decisions. As a practicing OB-GYN with over 30 years’ experience, I have seen firsthand that mail-order abortion drugs harm my patients, both mothers and their unborn children. Abortion advocates and corporate media ignore their stories as they shamelessly promote mail-order distribution of dangerous drugs without a single in-person doctor visit. As a tragic result, I expect to see more women need blood transfusions, emergency surgery and other drastic measures and our emergency medical systems overwhelmed. This is not health care, it’s abandonment and the pro-life community will never stop advocating for patients.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s State Policy Director, Katie Daniel, said in a statement that the “fight to stop dangerous mail-order abortion drugs is not over:”
Abortion drugs send approximately one in 25 women to the ER according to the FDA’s own label, yet the abortion lobby gaslights women about the risks and seeks to block states from even collecting safety data. Planned Parenthood boasts about dispensing these high-risk drugs by app, ‘completely free of face-to-face interaction with a clinician,’ to anyone with a mailing address – including traffickers and abusers. Mail-order abortion drugs are fueling domestic violence against women like Catherine Herring and her daughter Josephine, but the abortion industry does not care. The old talking point that abortion is a ‘choice between a woman and her doctor’ has been exposed as a lie. We stand with our allies, Attorneys General Raúl Labrador, Kris Kobach and Andrew Bailey, fighting to hold government bureaucrats accountable for betraying women and children.
Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International said the Supreme Court “has denied women justice today.”
“Women are more vulnerable than ever to shoddy research, predatory abortion practices, and extreme political ideology,” Godsey said. “The FDA has been rewarded for its bad behavior in expanding abortion while rolling back even common sense protections.”
Students for Life of America (SFLA) President Kristan Hawkins called the decision “disappointing but not surprising.”
“The Supreme Court’s decision to send this case away because of ‘standing’ was expected, but we expect the case to continue as those harmed by Chemical Abortion are MANY,” Hawkins said. “The Biden Administration permits abortion water pollution, which impacts all of us, and we also note that several states wanted to join the case because they are covering the costs of increasing emergency room traffic, as women are harmed by the deadly pills. We believe this will continue.”
Today the Supreme Court unanimously declined to find that the plaintiff doctors have Article III standing.
I hope that the liberal justices will adhere to this precedent in the future as historically they have been very willing to entertain much more tenuous standing theories…
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) June 13, 2024
Carrie Severino, President of JCN, responded on X to the Supreme Court’s decision, noting how the case “illustrates how the behemoth administrative state has empowered unelected bureaucrats to create regulations that affect the lives of everyday Americans but are so difficult—or even impossible—to successfully challenge in court.”
She said:
Today the Supreme Court unanimously declined to find that the plaintiff doctors have Article III standing. I hope that the liberal justices will adhere to this precedent in the future as historically they have been very willing to entertain much more tenuous standing theories for litigants whose positions they agreed with. Time will tell.
It’s notable that the Court went out of its way to underscore the importance of conscience rights and say that existing federal law protects rather than coerces pro-life doctors. This is meaningful given that the record showed that the doctors had to complete abortions at least a dozen times. Hospitals can no longer hide behind specious legal arguments to strong-arm doctors, contrary to their consciences.
This case illustrates how the behemoth administrative state has empowered unelected bureaucrats to create regulations that affect the lives of everyday Americans but are so difficult—or even impossible—to successfully challenge in court. This is why it’s so important that our laws are passed by our elected representatives rather than put into place by fiat by agency bureaucrats.
The consolidated cases are FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, Nos. 23-235 & 23-236 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.