Supreme court allows abortion pill mifepristone to continue to be available by mail

The US supreme court upheld nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Thursday. Louisiana sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely, arguing that it interfered with the state’s ban on abortion. The fifth circuit ruled in Louisiana’s favor on 1 May, effectively banning mail-order mifepristone for the entire country. Two mifepristone manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, filed an emergency request with the supreme court, which granted a temporary stay until at least Thursday. In a 7-2 decision with dissents from justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the court sided against the fifth circuit, ending the ban – for now. In his dissent, Thomas called the mailing of mifepristone to patients “criminal enterprise”. He also noted that the 1873 Comstock Act , which broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”, should apply to mifepristone. “What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” wrote Alito in his dissent, referencing the 2022 decision that overturned Roe v Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion. …