(LifeSiteNews) – A federal judge agreed to the Trump administration’s request to delay a hearing on a challenge to the abortion drug mifepristone until December, ensuring it will not be a factor in this fall’s midterm congressional elections.
Last December, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a joint lawsuit challenging the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) original approval of mifepristone in 2000, arguing that “approval and deregulation of abortion drugs have placed women and girls in harm’s way.”
It argues that since then the agency has handled the drug in an “arbitrary, capricious” way from its subsequent loosening of the regulations surrounding it, from expanding the gestational period during which it may be taken to letting non-physicians dispense it to eliminating the requirement that it be dispensed in person.
Stateline reported that U.S. Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor granted an FDA request to stay a hearing on the case until December 1, ostensibly to give more time to the government’s long-promised internal review of the pill’s safety data. At the same time, he rejected a bid by mifepristone manufacturer GenBioPro and distributor Danco Laboratories to dismiss the case entirely.
The ruling ensures hearings will not come before the November midterm elections, in which Republicans are widely believed to face an uphill battle. Critics have accused most of the Trump administration’s slowness to act on the issue of being driven by a desire to avoid the perceived political harm of strong pro-life action.
This is not the only lawsuit targeting federal abortion pill policy. Last fall, Louisiana sued the FDA over its Biden-era removal of the requirement that abortion drugs be dispensed in person that drastically expanded their usage, encroached on state law, and harmed women such as co-plaintiff Rosalie Markezich. The Trump administration has sought to delay that challenge as well, though Stateline reported that the Fifth Circuit is slated to hear oral arguments September 9.
Mail-order abortion pills have become the abortion lobby’s most potent tool for circumventing these laws and preserving “choice” without Roe v. Wade. The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, that Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills. Planned Parenthood’s 2024-2025 annual report boasts it alone committed 434,450 abortions, a record number for the organization and 8% more than the previous year.
Yet pro-lifers cite a wealth of evidence indicating this has come at the expense of women’s health and safety. An April 2025 analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center concluded that almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, joining similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation to form a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.”
Those risks are amplified, pro-lifers argue, when the pills are allowed to be taken in complete privacy without medical supervision or close access to emergency services for no other reason than to evade state pro-life laws.