SCOTUS retains telemedicine access to abortion pill

The Supreme Court of the US has ruled that the abortion pill mifepristone can continue to be prescribed remotely and delivered by mail-order, overruling an appeals court decision earlier this month.

The SCOTUS justices have granted a request by two companies that manufacture and sell mifepristone – Danco Labs and GenBioPro – to overturn a decision that made it mandatory for the drug to be prescribed and dispensed only after an in-person examination.

The earlier ruling by the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated that requirement in a suit brought by the Republican-led state of Louisiana, which has banned and criminalised abortion in nearly all cases and classified mifepristone as a controlled substance.

It's a temporary reprieve, as SCOTUS has simply shot down the injunction on remote access to mifepristone products while Louisiana's legal challenge works its way through the courts. Two conservative justices among SCOTUS's nine members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, opposed the decision.

Nevertheless, the decision has been welcomed by abortion rights advocates. Planned Parenthood Action said: "Mifepristone has helped ensure patients are able to make their own private medical decisions, and has expanded access to abortion care – something that remains under dire threat in this country."

It added: "While mifepristone access remains unchanged for now, threats to abortion access are far from over. We'll never stop fighting against politically motivated attacks on mifepristone and other sexual and reproductive health care."

Louisiana's lawsuit is challenging the FDA's Biden-era decision to introduce alternative routes to access the drug after the constitutional right to abortion – enshrined in the landmark Roe vs Wade ruling in 1973 – was overturned in 2022. That came in response to a swathe of conservative-leaning states introducing bans on pregnancy terminations.

The lawsuit contends that telemedicine access to mifepristone is undermining the state ban, which made it a criminal offence to ship the drug for use in abortions. In his dissent statement, Thomas said that Danco and GenBioPro "are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise."

Skye Perryman, the president and chief executive of advocacy group Democracy Forward, who oversaw the legal effort to make mifepristone available by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic on behalf of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (ACOG), said "years of real-world experience and rigorous science" support the safety of mail-order access.

"Anti-abortion extremists' attempts to paint it otherwise expose their true mission – to weaponise our courts to serve their political interests, ignore decades of scientific evidence proving mifepristone's safety, and put women directly in harm's way," he added.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash