The Supreme Court has ruled that a group of doctors challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s more recent approvals of the abortion pill mifepristone didn’t have standing to bring the suit.
The unanimous ruling means that the case—FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—was dismissed.
The newer approvals that had been the source of the lawsuit, occurring in 2016 and 2021, expanded access to the drug by letting clinicians other than physicians prescribe it, as well as letting patients receive the pill by mail. The pill, which is used in up to 50% of abortions in the United States, will remain widely available.
But because the court didn’t get to rule on the merits of the question posed—whether the FDA acted lawfully in issuing those approvals—experts say that the battle to ensure access to mifepristone is far from over.
“This is just a temporary pause in the battle over mifepristone,” says Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern University. “They will search for better plaintiffs—not doctors—and instead perhaps try to file a suit on behalf of a patient.”