CV NEWS FEED // In a unanimous ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent relaxations of the requirements to obtain and distribute the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone.
The Court’s 9-0 ruling on FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stated: “Plaintiffs lack Article III standing to challenge FDA’s actions regarding the regulation of mifepristone.”
“Article III standing is a ‘bedrock constitutional requirement that this Court has applied to all manner of important disputes,’” Kavanaugh wrote.
The justice argued that various criteria necessary to establish standing were not met in the case. “The plaintiff associations therefore cannot assert standing simply because they object to FDA’s actions,” he wrote:
The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone. But under Article III of the Constitution, those kinds of objections alone do not establish a justiciable case or controversy in federal court.
“[T]he federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions,” Kavanaugh continued. “The plaintiffs may present their concerns and objections to the President and FDA in the regulatory process, or to Congress and the President in the legislative process.”
>> HOW THE CLINTONS STRONGARMED THE FDA TO APPROVE THE ABORTION PILL <<
POLITICO reported that the case was filed in response to the FDA’s “decisions in 2016 and 2021 to relax various regulatory requirements around the drug.”
The Associated Press noted that “[o]ver the years, the FDA … repeatedly eased restrictions” on mifepristone, “culminating in a 2021 decision doing away with any in-person requirements and allowing the pill to be sent through the mail.”
CatholicVote Director of Governmental Affairs Tom McClusky said that while the decision is “unfortunate, it is not surprising.”
“It is not up to the courts solely to correct the problems created by past administrations, it is up to Congress and the next President of the United States, Donald Trump,” McClusky added.
Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Thomas Jipping and visiting fellow Melanie Israel wrote: “Today’s decision is not the final judgment on the safety or effectiveness of mifepristone, which we know is unsafe for women and causes up to 1 in 22 women to end up in the emergency room.”
Jipping and Israel continued:
While legal technicalities might allow Biden’s FDA to continue manipulating its safety rules to push a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of health and common sense, women and girls taking these chemical abortion drugs are still in danger and largely left to fend for themselves.
Policymakers should be on the side of women’s safety by, at a minimum, demanding that the FDA follow its own original safety guidelines, not give abortion drugs a pass because of radical abortion ideology.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel Erin Hawley stated: “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s lawless removal of commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs.”
“Nothing in today’s decision changes the fact that the FDA’s own label says that roughly one in 25 women who take chemical abortion drugs will end up in the emergency room—a dangerous reality the doctors and medical associations we represent in this case know all too well,” Hawley emphasized.
“The court recognized that our doctors would have standing to protect their conscience rights,” she wrote. “The government’s initial position was that federal law would not protect our doctors from being forced to participate in abortions.”
“Yet at the Supreme Court, the government changed its position and said that federal conscience laws definitively protect doctors in these circumstances,” Hawley noted. “This about-face explains why the Supreme Court parted ways with every other court to consider this case.”
“And it resulted in the court recognizing that ‘[f]ederal law fully protects doctors against being required to provide abortions or other medical treatment against their consciences,’” she wrote.
The post Supreme Court unanimously upholds proliferation of abortion drug appeared first on CatholicVote org.