The Supreme Court said late Friday that the abortion pill mifepristone — a drug millions of women have used to terminate early pregnancies — would remain widely available, at least for now.
The Supreme Court stayed an April 7 ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, which had relied on an arcane 1873 anti-vice law to target the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, insisting that abortion drugs could not be sent by mail or any other delivery service. The judge in that lower court, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, is a Trump administration appointee handpicked by antiabortion advocates, whose ruling relied on dubious scientific studies as well as charged language such as “unborn humans” to describe fetuses.
The following week, when the Biden administration appealed that ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked Judge Kacsmaryk’s attempt to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone but denied the administration’s request to preserve full access to the drug — typically used as part of a two-drug regimen in more than half of abortions performed in the United States. In fact, the appeals court allowed much of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling to stand while the case remained on appeal, making it difficult for women to get access to the drug — only after three in-person visits to physicians and only in the first seven weeks of pregnancy, not the 10 weeks that the FDA had authorized.
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End of carousel- The Biden administration releases a review on the Colorado River.
- The misery of Belarus’s political prisoners should not be ignored.
- Biden has a new border plan.
- The United States should keep the pressure on Nicaragua.
- America’s fight against inflation isn’t over.
- The Taliban has doubled down on the repression of women.
The Biden administration released an environmental impact statement outlining options for cutting use of the Colorado River. Water allocations could prioritize farmers in California based on centuries-old water rights, or involve proportional cuts to Arizona, California and Nevada. The review also included the costs of the status quo.
The administration will likely decide on a course of action by August. As we outlined in an editorial in February, a voluntary agreement between the states is the best option — and a dramatic reimagining of water use is needed thereafter.
Ihar Losik, one of hundreds of young people unjustly jailed in Belarus for opposing Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship, attempted suicide but was saved and sent to a prison medical unit, according to the human rights group Viasna. Losik, 30, a blogger who led a popular Telegram channel, was arrested in 2020 and is serving a 15-year prison term on charges of “organizing riots” and “incitement to hatred.” His wife is also a political prisoner. Read more about their struggle — and those of other political prisoners — in a recent editorial.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
Some 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners left that Central American country for the United States in February. President Daniel Ortega released and sent them into exile in a single motion. Nevertheless, it appears that Mr. Ortega let them go under pressure from economic sanctions the United States imposed on his regime when he launched a wave of repression in 2018. The Biden administration should keep the pressure on. Read recent editorials about the situation in Nicaragua.
Inflation remains stubbornly high at 6.4 percent in January. The Federal Reserve’s job is not done in this fight. More interest rate hikes are needed. Read a recent editorial about inflation and the Fed.
Afghanistan’s rulers had promised that barring women from universities was only temporary. But private universities got a letter on Jan. 28 warning them that women are prohibited from taking university entrance examinations. Afghanistan has 140 private universities across 24 provinces, with around 200,000 students. Out of those, some 60,000 to 70,000 are women, the AP reports. Read a recent editorial on women’s rights in Afghanistan.
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The Supreme Court on Friday did what the 5th Circuit should have, staying Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling in full. As is customary in cases such as these, the court’s majority did not explain its reasoning. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, Justice Alito arguing that stopping easy access to this abortion pill “would simply restore the circumstances that existed (and that the Government defended) from 2000 to 2016 under three Presidential administrations.” The FDA had originally approved mifepristone in 2000.
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But, among other oversights, Justice Alito’s dissent ignores that the drug’s challengers — doctors who claim they would have to treat women who take mifepristone and get complications — have not experienced the kind of particularized, remediable harm from the FDA’s approval of the drug that would qualify them to even bring their lawsuit challenging the drug’s distribution. Typically, conservative jurists are sticklers for insisting that plaintiffs have “standing” to sue, a principle that limits judicial intervention to true “cases” and “controversies.” This case should not have proceeded beyond even the threshold question of standing, let alone resulted in any limits on the FDA’s mifepristone rules. That it did is a disheartening sign about the professionalism of some on the federal bench.
The Biden administration was right to call the lower court’s decision an unprecedented attack not only on women’s health care but also on the authority and expertise of the FDA, whose approval of mifepristone relied on data from numerous clinical trials. In recent years, the conservative legal movement has targeted multiple facets of the administrative state, and the attack on the FDA is no exception: If the Supreme Court agreed with Judge Kacsmaryk, the FDA’s regulatory authority over other drugs would be called into question.
Though the justices have avoided this mistake, for the moment, Friday’s decision nevertheless underscores how crucial, and vulnerable, access to reproductive care remains.