So said the Supreme Court

Wednesday

it will decide whether to place stricter limits on abortion pills, which are now the most common method of ending premature pregnancies.

The justices voted to uphold the Biden administration’s appeal, reconsidering rulings by conservative judges in Texas who disagreed with the Food and Drug Administration’s view that mifepristone is safe, effective and can be widely dispensed.

At issue are 2016 and 2021 FDA regulations that extended the time to use the pills from seven weeks to 10 weeks of pregnancy and to dispense the medication without requiring one or more visits to a doctor’s office. Currently, the pills can be dispensed through a pharmacy or sent by post.

Since the drugs were first approved by the FDA in 2000, they have been used by more than five million women in this country and even more around the world, government lawyers said.

The FDA case will be heard in the spring and is the most important abortion case since the court’s conservative majority struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.

If the court were to rule against anti-abortion advocates who filed a lawsuit in Texas, it would limit the legal use of abortion drugs to seven weeks of pregnancy and require patients to

make one or

more visits to a doctor.

In April, the government won a temporary victory when justices voted to block rulings by a West Texas judge and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. did not agree with that.

In her appeal, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued that the anti-abortion activists who filed the case in Amarillo, Texas, had no standing to sue, and she said the Texas judges had no basis to to reverse the FDA’s regulations.

She said the decisions in Texas mark the first time a court has limited access to an FDA-approved drug based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment on the conditions necessary to ensure drugs can be safely administered used, much less after those conditions had been in force for years. .”

While the district judge in Amarillo would have ordered the drugs removed from the market, the 5th Circuit judges agreed that it was too late to approve the FDA’s 2000 decisions to approve the use of mifepristone, to challenge. But the 5th Circuit rejected regulatory updates in 2016 and 2021 that allowed the drugs to be dispensed through pharmacies and by mail.

She said the courts should not veto ‘a scientific judgment’

NTFDA

has maintained across multiple administrations

S”

and “imposing unnecessary restrictions on the distribution of a drug that has been used safely by millions of Americans for more than two decades.”

Lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which aimed to end the use of abortion pills, described the 5th Circuit’s approach as “a modest decision.” [that] merely restores the common sense safeguards under which millions of women have used chemical abortion drugs.”

As the administrator

If the country’s rules are followed, they said, the “national mail-order abortion program” would effectively make the procedure available nationwide.