WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Supreme Court on Monday issued a temporary order pausing a ruling by a federal court that blocked distribution of the abortion pill mifepristone by mail nationwide.
The interim order, signed by Justice Samuel Alito, reinstates for now the Biden Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) rule that allows mifepristone to be prescribed and dispensed without an in-person visit.
The order expires on May 11 at 5 p.m. and comes after emergency appeals by two manufacturers of mifepristone.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had blocked the Biden FDA policy in a major ruling on Friday. The appeals court sided with Louisiana, which is challenging the rule on the grounds that it undermines the state’s pro-life laws and forces it to spend Medicaid funding on emergency care for women injured by the drug.
The Supreme Court’s order on Monday, an “administrative stay,” does not necessarily indicate how the court may eventually rule.
The order came from Alito, a conservative who authored the court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, because he oversees emergency matters arising from the Fifth Circuit.
Alito gave Louisiana until Thursday to respond to the abortion pill makers’ emergency requests.
The FDA’s rule, which the Biden administration issued after the reversal of Roe, has massively increased the use of abortion pills, hindering the effectiveness of pro-life laws, increasing abortion rates, and causing serious harm to women, according to data.
Abortionists and abortion drug networks have mailed tens of thousands of pills into pro-life states under the Biden policy, often enabled by “shield laws” in Democrat states that protect illegal abortion pill distributors from out-of-state law enforcement.
Around two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. are currently estimated to be committed using pills. Nearly 250,000 so-called “telehealth abortions” occurred in 2024 – more than a quarter of all abortions that year – according to a report by the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning.
Chemical abortions, or abortions done with pills, are typically committed using a combination of mifepristone and another drug, misoprostol.
Louisiana is one of more than a dozen states that have banned nearly all abortions since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The state also outlawed abortion pills as controlled substances in 2024.
Judges criticized Biden FDA’s abortion rule, said it undermines Louisiana’s sovereignty
A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit had unanimously backed Louisiana’s lawsuit on Friday, temporarily halting the abortion pill rule while the case moves forward. Two of the judges were appointed by President Donald Trump and one by President George W. Bush.
The judges ruled that Louisiana is likely to succeed in the challenge, saying that the FDA policy “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone. Both injuries are irreparable.”
Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, pharmaceutical companies that make mifepristone, filed emergency appeals with the Supreme Court on Saturday. They asked the high court to take up the case and rule on the merits and to hear oral arguments before the court’s summer recess.
In 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a lawsuit against the FDA’s abortion pill regulations by a group of pro-life doctors, saying that they didn’t have standing to sue.
However, Louisiana’s challenge uses a different legal approach focused on state sovereignty and Medicaid expenses.
The lawsuit also specifically targets the Biden administration’s 2023 rule that permanently ended the previous in-person requirement for mifepristone. The Biden FDA had initially suspended the requirement in 2021, citing COVID-19, in a move slammed by pro-lifers.
In April, federal district Judge David Joseph agreed that Louisiana had standing and said that the state was likely to succeed but temporarily left the 2023 policy in place and gave the Trump administration more time to complete a supposed review of abortion pill data. The Fifth Circuit overrode his ruling on Saturday.
“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical [i.e., chemical] abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” the appeals court said. “Once lost, that sovereign prerogative of protecting unborn life cannot be regained by legal remedy.”
The Fifth Circuit panel added that the removal of the in-person dispensing requirement “likely lacked a basis in data and scientific literature.”
“The public interest is not served by perpetuating a medical practice whose safety the agency admits was inadequately studied. Indeed, the public interest demands the opposite,” the judges wrote.