The U.S. Supreme Court stands in Washington.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court has extended the administrative stay to allow abortion drug mifepristone to remain available at least through Thursday.
Justice Samuel Alito
Justice Samuel Alito signed two orders May 11 extending the stay that was supposed to expire at 5 p.m. EDT Monday. It now ends at 5 p.m. EDT Thursday, May 14.
On May 4, Alito signed an order temporarily allowing women seeking abortions to obtain mifepristone at pharmacies or through the mail without an in-person doctor’s visit.
A week earlier, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously restricted access to the drug by mail. That ruling required mifepristone to only be distributed in person and at clinics. That overruled regulations set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Mifepristone is one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, which is the most common form of abortion in the United States.
Louisiana took the matter to court last year hoping to reinstate a requirement for in-person dispensing, arguing mail access circumvented the state’s abortion laws. When the Fifth Circuit Panel granted the state’s request last month, two drug makers – GenBioPro and Danco – took the case to the Supreme Court to pause that order.
Murrill
"Big abortion drug dealers want an emergency stay so they can continue to profit from killing more babies by mail without any sort of medical oversight or concern for the health of women taking these pills,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said Monday after Alito extended the stay. “The administrative stay is temporary. I am confident that life and the law will prevail in the end.
“We will never stop protecting women and babies in Louisiana.”
The Texas Alliance for Life also weighed in on the stay.
“In the meantime, state pro-life laws like Texas’s are being bypassed through mail-order abortion drugs, putting pregnant women and their unborn children at risk and undermining the will of Texas voters,” the group said in a statement. “Notably, the FDA itself acknowledged that its 2023 rule relaxing the in-person dispensing requirement was marred by ‘procedural deficits’ and a ‘lack of adequate consideration’ of the safety data.
“We will continue watching closely as the Supreme Court decides whether the Fifth Circuit’s order will take effect as the case proceeds. State pro-life laws deserve to be respected. The life, health and future fertility of women nationwide should be a priority, not a casualty of a mail-order workaround that bypasses common-sense safeguards.”
