The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals offered a compromise: While the appeal was moving through the system, the medication would remain on the market with additional restrictions.
After temporarily blocking the 5th Circuit’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to keep all of these potential changes to mifepristone’s approval on ice until the case can be considered more fully.Friday’s ruling allows mifepristone to remain on the market with the same restrictions that were in place before Kacsmaryk’s ruling.
Mifepristone, when taken alongside misoprostol, is the most common way Americans terminate their pregnancies. Numerous, as well as 23 years of use on the market, have shown it to be safe and effective. But with more than a dozen states, including Texas, now banning abortion, the pills have emerged as a focal point for abortion opponents.
In court last month, Erik Baptist, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which brought the lawsuit, said removing abortion-inducing drugs from the market “helps stop the federal government from illegally subverting these 14 states’ laws and regulations designed to protect their people from dangerous chemical abortion drugs.”
Even as this case moves further afield from Texas, the fight to ban abortion medication rages on within the Lone Star State. On Friday, Attorney General