Supreme Court extends stay on Texas abortion pill ruling until Friday
The Supreme Court on Wednesday extended a temporary stay to preserve the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone amid ongoing litigation.
The administrative stay will last until the end of Friday.
The decision came just hours before a midnight deadline from Justice Samuel Alito, who last Friday granted a temporary, five-day pause in an unprecedented Texas order deeming the drug dangerous.
A federal appeals court panel partially blocked Kacsmaryk’s unprecedented ruling, but still imposed restrictions that prevent mifepristone from being mailed to patients.
The Biden administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay, saying the appeals court’s decision would put the FDA in an “impossible position.”
“Without a stay, the lower courts’ unprecedented nationwide order would disrupt the regulatory regime governing a drug that the FDA has determined to be safe and effective under approved conditions and that has been used by more than five million American women over the past two decades,” he added. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote to the court on Tuesday.
Unprecedented abortion pill ruling in Texas fuels ‘judge shopping’ debate
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group representing pill opponents, dismissed the agency’s claims about the impact of suspending access to the abortion pill as a “sky-is-falling argument.”
“The careful rulings of the lower courts do not call into question the agency’s scientific findings, they merely require the agency to follow the law,” the group’s lawyers told the court.
