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Federal Judge Revives Legal Effort To Limit Access to Abortion Pill

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on Jan 22, 2025.

By Carole Tanzer Miller HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 22, 2025 -- Efforts to limit access to the abortion drug mifepristone have received a boost from a federal judge who took the bench during President Donald Trump's first term.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that Missouri, Kansas and Idaho can move ahead with a lawsuit seeking to revamp prescribing and use of the drug. Kaczmaryk, of the Northern District of Texas, has a history of strong anti-abortion views, according to The Washington Post.

His order, issued Thursday, opens a new round of litigation over the prescription drug. Mifepristone grew in importance when the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman's constitutional right to abortion in 2022.

Since then, abortion opponents have attempted to limit access to the drug. A case brought by a coalition of doctors failed last year when justices ruled they had no standing to bring the case.

The ruling left open the possibility that state governments would have standing, paving the way for the new challenge, the Post reported.

Defendants in the case -- the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures the drug -- argued that the plaintiffs have no ties to Texas and therefore, no standing to bring the case. They argued it belongs in Missouri, Idaho, Texas or Washington, D.C. But Kacsmaryk's ruling deferred that decision for now.

Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies abortion and the law, said the states deliberately chose not to file in a different court.

"They're not doing that for one obvious reason that everybody knows, which is that they want Kacsmaryk," she told the Post. "They want that anti-abortion judge to hear their case and to kind of give them a sympathetic ear."

The first challenge to mifepristone was brought in 2022 by a coalition of anti-abortion doctors and others called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. It argued that the FDA did not adequately weigh safety when it approved the drug in 2000 or in 2016, when it allowed the medication to be used later in pregnancy, for health care providers other than doctors to prescribe it, and for it to be mailed to patients.

At that time Kacsmaryk sided with the challengers and suspended FDA approval — a ruling scaled back by an appeals court, according to the Post. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the entire ruling, saying the anti-abortion coalition lacked standing to bring the case.

Missouri, Kansas and Idaho say they have standing because they are incurring extra public insurance costs for care related to mifepristone. Missouri and Idaho officials claim allowing the pills to be mailed from states where abortion is legal undermines their efforts to enforce strict statewide abortion bans.

They want the FDA to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone, allowing it to be used only in the first seven weeks of pregnancy and dispensed only in person, the Post reported.

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Posted January 2025

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