June 14, 2024
Yesterday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s initial approval of and ongoing ability to regulate the abortion drug mifepristone. The Court ruled that the plaintiffs, an organization of anti-abortion doctors called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, “lack Article III standing to challenge FDA’s actions.”
CFI General Counsel Richard Conn observed that the Court’s unanimous ruling was also notably a technical one. “Standing refers to the threshold issue federal courts consider prior to reaching the merits of a case, namely the right or capacity of a litigant to bring a case,” Conn said. “Dismissal of this case on standing grounds means that the Court did not decide the merits of lawsuit.”
Accordingly, while today’s ruling is an important victory for reproductive rights, it deserves a muted celebration because the court’s unanimous opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, leaves the door open to similar challenges in the future by challengers who may have proper standing.
The Center for Inquiry cited the glaring question of the plaintiff’s legal standing following the initial ruling in their favor by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that briefly blocked mifepristone access nationwide. However, standing is just one of the disqualifying issues at the heart of this case. In addition, no scientifically sound arguments were advanced or overturning the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, as evidenced by more than two decades of safe use by women throughout the United States. In fact, as the Washington Post wrote earlier this week, “some of the scientific studies underlying the legal challenge to the abortion pill were retracted by Sage, the academic publishing company, over methodological and ethical concerns.”
This was a transparent effort by religiously motivated activists, acting under the guise of concerned doctors and scientists, to use ideologically friendly courts to enforce their theocratic agenda. And it came very close to working.
“Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s gratuitous mention of the challengers’s ‘sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections’ to elective abortion is disquieting to the secular community,” Conn said. “It’s just the latest example of the Court’s promulgating the purported linkage between religious belief and morality, a relationship we would contend is fictitious.”