The Supreme Court rejected an effort to restrict the abortion pill mifepristone from the marketplace, ruling unanimously that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
A number of anti-abortion medical associations and and several doctors challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s relaxed restrictions on access to the drug.
But the justices ruled that the plaintiffs lacked sufficient standing, as they were “unregulated parties who seek to challenge the FDA’s regulation of others.”
“The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the opinion. “But under Article III of the Constitution, those kinds of objections alone do not establish a justiciable case or controversy in federal court.”
Kavanaugh wrote, “Here, the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that FDA’s relaxed regulatory requirements likely would cause them to suffer an injury in fact. For that reason, the federal courts
are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions. 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. And they may also express their views about abortion and mifepristone to fellow citizens, including in the political and electoral processes.”
Read the Supreme Court abortion drug opinion.
More to come.
