The court’s three liberal judges said they would have refused the Trump administration’s request for residency. In a divergent opinion, Judges Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said that the federal government rules restricting the dispensation of the abortion pill, mifepristone, are medically unnecessary and are an unnecessary, unjustifiable, irrational and improper burden for women.
“According to government policy, patients can now receive prescriptions for powerful opioids without leaving home, but women still have to travel to a doctor’s office to pick up mifepristone, just to turn around, go home and without supervision, “they wrote. They also said that the Trump administration could not prove how it would cause harm by continuing the delivery of the pills while the courts weigh the merits of the case.
A short-handed Supreme Court did not want to intervene in the same case in October, allowing abortion clinics to dispense the pills through telemedicine and email, which they said kept patients and staff safer during the pandemic.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to reconsider its request after Barrett joined the bank. The administration said continuing to uphold FDA’s rules on mifepristone, which was approved 20 years ago, ‘does not pose a significant burden on abortion access.’
The U.S. Civil Liberties Union, which has represented abortion clinics disputing FDA rules, said in a statement that the court’s ruling “exposes patients to unnecessary COVID-19 risks” and calls on the incoming Biden government to to delete the FDA rule.
“It is astonishing that the Trump administration is on top of the road to unnecessarily endangering more people through this dark pandemic winter – and it is appalling that the Supreme Court has allowed this,” said Julia Kaye, an attorney at the ACLU. reproductive freedom project.
The ACLU in separate lawsuits also insists that the courts permanently lift FDA restrictions on abortion medication, which is the most common method of abortion in the first ten weeks of pregnancy. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion groups have called on the FDA to revoke access to the abortion pill altogether.