US supreme court to decide on abortion pill access after extending deadline

The supreme court is poised to decide whether to preserve access to a widely used abortion medication, after extending its deadline to act until at least Friday.

The court had initially set a deadline of 11.59pm on Wednesday, but that afternoon, Justice Samuel Alito issued a brief order extending its stay by up to 48 hours. The one-sentence order provided no explanation for the delay but indicated the court expects to act before midnight on Friday.

The appeals court has scheduled oral arguments in the case on 17 May.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a coalition of anti-abortion doctors and organizations, has argued that the FDA failed to follow proper protocols and adequately assess safety concerns when it approved mifepristone for use in 2000 and in the regulatory actions it has taken since. Medical experts have said the claims are dubious and ignore decades of research and data from hundreds of medical studies showing mifepristone is both a safe and an effective way to end a pregnancy.

The challengers filed their lawsuit in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and a former attorney at Christian law group with long-held conservative views on gender and reproductive rights, is the only sitting judge.

Complicating the legal landscape, on the same day that Kacsmaryk ruled, a federal judge in Washington state, Thomas Rice, issued a contradictory order in a separate lawsuit brought by Democratic attorneys general in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The decision, which Rice reaffirmed after the appeals ruling in the Texas case, blocked the FDA from limiting the availability of mifepristone in those states.

Since the fall of Roe, more than a dozen US states have banned or severely restricted abortion. But many other states have moved in the opposite direction, passing legislation and approving ballot initiatives that protect abortion rights. Amid the patchwork legal landscape, attention has turned to medication abortion, which can be obtained by mail and administered at home.

Mifepristone is the first pill in a two-drug regimen that is the most common method of ending a pregnancy, accounting for more than half of all abortions in the US.

Depending on how the justices rule, those changes could be reversed, at least while the case proceeds through the courts. On Wednesday, GenBioPro, the manufacturer of the generic form of mifepristone, sued the FDA to keep the drug on the market, setting up a new front in the legal battle over access to abortion medication.