Background: Light illuminates part of the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File.) Inset: Bottles of abortion pills mifepristone, left, and misoprostol, right, at a clinic in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File.)
With the release of its schedule on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear oral arguments next month weighing whether the high court can overturn a ruling that revoked approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
Oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine will be held on March 25. As Law&Crime reported last month, the Biden administration asked the high court to overrule a conservative-majority appellate court finding that revoked U.S. Food & Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, or as it more commonly referred, the abortion pill.
Approved for use for the last 23 years, the pill is considered the most effective drug on the market for safe, medical abortions. Only one other drug, misoprostol, does the same but it has been proven to be less effective when used on its own instead of as prescribed: in a combined course with mifepristone.
After Roe v. Wade was obliterated by the high court in 2022, anti-abortion advocates Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, or AHM, sued the FDA claiming mifepristone was “unsafe” while simultaneously acknowledging that conclusion was “not based on rigorous scientific review and analysis but on speculation and the personal opinions of two physicians.”
Lawyers for the Biden administration appealed, arguing mifepristone was a medical and practical necessity.
What happens with the abortion pill case does not occur in a vacuum, as its impact may reach beyond drugs that affect only women or people who can become pregnant. If the justices sign off on AHM’s challenge to the FDA’s independent authority to approve drugs, and find that Kacsmaryk was within his rights to unilaterally demand the FDA roll back a decades-old drug approval, it could set a precedent that other judges could similarly interfere with approval of any and all drugs.
Elura Nanos contributed to this report.
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