Newsom joins push for abortion pill
Governors of California and other Democratic-led states urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to maintain women’s access to the pills used in more than half of all U.S. abortions, saying a ban or restrictions on mifepristone would harm women and their states and would protect no one.
“Significantly reducing access to mifepristone will not make patients safer — it will only add extreme burdens to healthcare providers, patients, state medical systems, and those responsible for safeguarding public health and safety,” the governors of 21 states and the territory of Guam said in a filing with the court.
The court will hear arguments on March 26 in a suit by a group of antiabortion doctors who recently challenged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 decision that found mifepristone to be safe and effective. Their suit also contested the FDA’s later decisions to allow the pills to be used in up to 10 weeks of pregnancy rather than seven, to be prescribed by a medical professional who is not a doctor and to be prescribed and delivered by mail rather than in person at the doctor’s office.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that it had established in January 1973. But the court has allowed mifepristone to remain available by mail under the FDA’s standards while it considers the case, with a ruling due by the end of June.
Mifepristone and a second pill, misoprostol, are more than 99% effective in terminating a pregnancy. According to the FDA and most health care researchers, they rarely have side effects and are far safer than giving birth.
Lower-court orders in the case did not bar misoprostol, which is about 85% effective by itself in ending a pregnancy but can have side effects such as pain and bleeding. The challenge to mifepristone was enabled by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, who said doctors who did not perform abortions themselves could claim harm from the impact the pills allegedly cause in the health care system.
The 22 governors, who call themselves the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, denounced that decision and its impacts in Tuesday’s Supreme Court filing.
“If a single court can invalidate those FDA decisions nationwide based on a flimsy challenge from a group of doctors who do not even prescribe mifepristone, the effect will be seismic — creating unprecedented publichealth challenges that Reproductive Freedom Alliance Governors will have no realistic ability to address and that will harm doctors and patients across the country,” lawyers for the governors told the court.
They said studies have shown that mifepristone is safer than prescription drugs such as penicillin and Viagra and over-thecounter medications such as Tylenol.
As conservative-led states acted to restrict or ban abortion, the governors said, abortions in the remaining states increased by an average of 9,733 per month in the year after the 2022 ruling. States where abortion is legal have been stockpiling abortion pills, and California added more than $200 million in abortionrelated funding in 202223, the filing noted.
Restricting access to mifepristone in the wake of the 2022 abortion ruling would cause “harm all around,” the governors told the court: “harm to women, particularly rural and low-income women, who will be required to visit in-person clinics simply to take a prescription medication, or may not be able to access mifepristone for abortion or miscarriage management at all; harm to providers, clinics, and health systems, who will be overwhelmed with demand; harm to Governors, whose critical tools to safeguard public health will be unnecessarily curbed; and harm to the public fisc, which will bear the brunt of many of the economic costs.”
The case is FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, No. 23-235.
“Significantly reducing access to mifepristone will not make patients safer ...” Reproductive Freedom Alliance court filing