The highest court has a lot of pressure on their shoulders. And not everybody is going to be happy with what they do.
And now the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that left everyone scratching their heads.
In a majority decision Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent relaxations of the rules for obtaining and distributing the abortion-inducing medication mifepristone.
The Court’s 9-0 decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, issued by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said that “plaintiffs lack Article III standing to challenge FDA’s actions regarding the regulation of mifepristone.”
“Article III standing is a ‘bedrock constitutional requirement that this Court has applied to all manner of important disputes,’” Kavanaugh wrote.
The justice contended that the conditions required to prove standing were not met in this case.
“The plaintiff associations therefore cannot assert standing simply because they object to FDA’s actions,” he wrote:
The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone. But under Article III of the Constitution, those kinds of objections alone do not establish a justiciable case or controversy in federal court.
“[T]he federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions,” Kavanaugh continued.
“The plaintiffs may present their concerns and objections to the President and FDA in the regulatory process, or to Congress and the President in the legislative process.”
According to POLITICO, the action was brought in response to the FDA’s “decisions in 2016 and 2021 to relax various regulatory requirements around the drug.”
The FDA “repeatedly eased restrictions” on mifepristone over the years, according to the Associated Press, with the final decision coming in 2021 that eliminated all in-person requirements and let the pill to be supplied by mail.
And the problem with the pill isn’t only the abortion issue, it’s the way it is hurting the women that take it.
Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Thomas Jipping and visiting fellow Melanie Israel wrote: “Today’s decision is not the final judgment on the safety or effectiveness of mifepristone, which we know is unsafe for women and causes up to 1 in 22 women to end up in the emergency room.”
Jipping and Israel went on:
While legal technicalities might allow Biden’s FDA to continue manipulating its safety rules to push a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of health and common sense, women and girls taking these chemical abortion drugs are still in danger and largely left to fend for themselves.
Policymakers should be on the side of women’s safety by, at a minimum, demanding that the FDA follow its own original safety guidelines, not give abortion drugs a pass because of radical abortion ideology.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel Erin Hawley stated: “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s lawless removal of commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs.”
“Nothing in today’s decision changes the fact that the FDA’s own label says that roughly one in 25 women who take chemical abortion drugs will end up in the emergency room—a dangerous reality the doctors and medical associations we represent in this case know all too well,” Hawley emphasized.
But it’s not always up to the Supreme Court to figure these things out. At the end of the day, they aren’t made to legislate.
“It is not up to the courts solely to correct the problems created by past administrations, it is up to Congress and the next President of the United States, Donald Trump,” CatholicVote Director of Governmental Affairs Tom McClusky said of the ruling.
Stay tuned to Conservative Column.
