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(Trends Wide) –– Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito again extended access to the abortion pill in the United States on Wednesday as the high court weighs the case, temporarily suspending a lower court ruling that ordered restrictions on access to the drug.
The measure seeks to give judges more time to consider the issue, although it does not anticipate how their ruling in the case will be.
In a similar order last week, Alito had said the Supreme Court would have a ruling at 11:59 p.m. Miami time on Wednesday. The new order, called an “administrative stay,” moves that deadline to Friday, April 21.
Alito wrote the order because he has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the dispute.
“Today’s order reveals nothing about how the full (Supreme) Court will rule, other than that there is likely to be some kind of writing, either by the majority or by the justices who could be writing concursions or dissents for separately,” explained Steve Vladeck, a Trends Wide Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “But it is impossible to know what that ruling will be like. All we know for sure is that we will have more information by the end of Friday night,” he added.
This is the most important abortion-related case to go to the Supreme Court since the justices struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, prompting conservative states across the country to ban or severely restrict the procedure. How the dispute over medical abortion is ultimately resolved could make it more difficult for women to access it, even in states that still allow it.
At stake is the extent of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) authority to regulate the drug mifepristone, which has been deemed safe and effective by the medical community. Mifepristone has been used by millions of women across the country in the more than two decades it has been on the market.
The legal battle began last November when a group representing anti-abortion doctors filed a lawsuit arguing that the FDA had not done enough to ensure the drug’s safety some two decades earlier.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, issued a sweeping ruling on April 7 that blocked approval of the drug, as well as changes the FDA made in subsequent years to make it more accessible. . However, he pushed back the effective date of his ruling by seven days to allow time for an appeal.
Rejecting the consensus of the medical community, Kacsmaryk raised questions about the drug’s safety, including in his opinion the jargon often used by opponents of abortion. He branded the doctors who perform the procedure “abortionists” and explained that he would reject the term “fetus” in favor of the more incendiary “unborn human.” Rather than refer to the procedure as a “medical abortion,” he insisted on calling it a “chemical abortion.”
The FDA, Kacsmaryk argued at one point, “acquiesced in its legitimate safety concerns, in violation of its legal duty, based on clearly flawed reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”
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