Members of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that anti-abortion doctors do not have standing to challenge approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs often used in medication abortions, by the United States Food and Drug Administration.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that doctors from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine have “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to mifepristone being prescribed and used,” but said that the federal courts are the “wrong forum” for addressing their concerns.
“The plaintiffs may present their concerns and objections to the president and FDA in the regulatory process or to Congress and the president in the legislative process,” Kavanaugh asserted in the majority opinion. “They may also express their views about abortion and mifepristone to fellow citizens, including in the political and electoral processes.”
The most common medication abortion regimen offered in the United States involves a combination of mifepristone, which blocks a pregnancy hormone called progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes the murdered child to be ejected from the uterus. President Joe Biden issued a statement after the decision criticizing regulations on abortion in multiple states.
The case nevertheless only pertained to mifepristone and would not have broadly banned medication abortion, according to an explainer published last year by Abolish Abortion Texas.
The organization noted that “medication abortions using just misoprostol without mifepristone are common around the world” and contended that efforts to end abortion should not be “about merely making abortion more difficult to access or regulating the means and methods.”
“First and foremost, abolishing abortion is about criminalizing the act of causing the death of a preborn human being with criminal intent,” the explainer continued. “It’s about providing the equal protection of the homicide laws to all people. If we aren’t willing to do that, then we aren’t loving our preborn neighbors as ourselves. There will always be another method of killing or a new weapon to go after. Fifty years of abortion regulations should have taught us that.”
Officials in Louisiana, for instance, approved a law last month saying that parents attempting to murder their own children with mifepristone and misoprostol should first obtain a prescription for the substances. The statute also exempted women from prosecution for possessing them.