Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Abortion Drug

The Supreme Court has set a date to hear arguments on a case concerning the availability of mifepristone, a drug used to end a pregnancy or treat a miscarriage in what will be the court's first time returning to the issue of abortion since its landmark ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

The court announced on Monday that oral arguments in the case, in which a conservative group, Alliance Defending Freedom, sued the Food and Drug Administration to overturn their changes made to the regulation of mifepristone after 2016. A three-judge panel on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last August that the drug could remain available for sale, but that the FDA's dosage and prescription guidelines should return to what they were before 2016.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in December but had yet to set a date to hear oral arguments, which are now scheduled to begin on March 26.

"Every court so far has agreed that the FDA acted unlawfully in removing common-sense safeguards for women and authorizing dangerous mail-order abortions," Erin Hawley, the senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, told Politico in a statement. "We urge the Supreme Court to do the same. The FDA has harmed the health of women and undermined the rule of law by illegally removing every meaningful safeguard from the chemical abortion drug regimen."

Evan Masingill, the chief executive of GenBioPro, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures a generic version of the drug, criticized the lawsuit in a statement.

"As we noted in our friend of the court brief earlier this year, disrupting the market for mifepristone would cause substantial, irreparable harm, and we call on the Supreme Court to reverse the Fifth Circuit's ruling," Masingill said. "We remain concerned about extremists and special interests using the courts in an attempt to undermine science and access to evidence-based medication, as well as attempts to undermine the FDA's regulatory authority."

• Supreme Court Lets Feds Cut Razor Wire Texas Put at Border
• Supreme Court Declines to Halt First US Nitrogen-Gas Execution in Ala. Case