Louisiana asked the Supreme Court Thursday to speed-run oral arguments in its case — if the Court maintains its stay on a lower court ruling that would reimpose in-person dispensing requirements on abortion pill mifepristone, barring the drug from being sent by mail.
The state primarily asked the Court to let the 5th Circuit’s order take effect while the case plays out. But if it doesn’t, the attorneys wrote, the Court should take up the case before the summer recess because “approximately 1,000 abortions are taking place in Louisiana every month, undermining its ‘prerogative of protecting unborn life.’”
The in-person dispensing requirements the state wants to restore were temporarily lifted during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, and permanently lifted in 2023.
Red states have become fixated on mailed mifepristone since Dobbs, when it became the primary way that women in abortion deserts were able to get care. A hastily assembled group of anti-abortion doctors went after the lifted restrictions and authorization of the drug itself, but the Court unanimously found that it lacked standing in 2024. States including Louisiana have essentially stepped into that case, with a narrower focus on the Biden-era changes that allowed the drug to be prescribed over telehealth and mailed to patients.
A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Louisiana’s favor last week, briefly reimposing the in-person requirements for the whole country. The Supreme Court administratively stayed that ruling on Monday. The deadline for filing briefs has now passed, and the stay is set to expire next Monday (though the Court can always extend that deadline).
In a bizarre wrinkle, the Trump Food and Drug Administration — the actual defendant in the case — has not filed anything, leaving two mifepristone manufacturers that intervened in the case to lead the fight against Louisiana. The FDA’s posture generally has been that judges should pause or dismiss the red state challenges until it completes a review of the safety of mifepristone.
The justices will now decide whether mifepristone will remain regularly accessible during this litigation, or whether it will reimpose restrictions that will, at least temporarily, make the drug much more difficult for women in red states to get. That decision will be a signal indicating the right-wing justices’ appetite to hand down a major abortion ruling, though it will come on the shadow docket, possibly without any written explanation.
Read Louisiana’s ruling here:
