The court’s three liberal judges said they would have denied the Trump administration’s suspension request. In a differing opinion, judges Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said that federal government rules that restrict the dispensing of the abortion pill, mifepristone, are medically unnecessary and represent “an unnecessary, unjustifiable, irrational and undue burden” for women.
“Government policy now allows patients to receive prescriptions for powerful opioids without leaving home, but it still requires women to go to the doctor’s office to get mifepristone, just to turn around, go home and take it without supervision,” they wrote. They also said that the Trump administration has failed to prove how it would be harmed by allowing delivery of the pills in the mail to continue while the courts assessed the merits of the case.
A Supreme Court of Justice refused to intervene in the same case in October, allowing abortion clinics to continue dispensing pills via telemedicine and mail, which they said kept patients and staff safer during the pandemic.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to reconsider its request after Barrett joined the bank. The government said that continuing to apply long-standing FDA rules on mifepristone, which was approved 20 years ago, “does not create a substantial burden on access to abortion.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented abortion clinics in defiance of FDA rules, said in a statement that the court’s decision “exposes patients to unnecessary COVID-19 risks” and called on the new Biden government to repeal the FDA rule .
“It’s impressive that the Trump administration’s top priority on its way out the door is to unnecessarily endanger even more people during this dark and scary pandemic winter that the Supreme Court has allowed,” said Julia Kaye, a lawyer for the Reproductive Freedom Project. ACLU.
The ACLU in separate litigation is also pressing the courts to permanently lift FDA restrictions on abortion drugs, which is the most common method of abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion groups have asked the FDA to revoke access to the abortion pill entirely.