KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Erin Morrow Hawley, an attorney and wife of one of Missouri’s senators, is at the center of a federal lawsuit in Texas that could cancel approval of a common drug used to terminate pregnancies, threatening abortion across the country.
Hawley is one of the key lawyers fighting to end the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, after the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. Hawley, an appellate attorney who was also involved in that case, is married to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
Whether or not Hawley and the other attorneys on the Texas case are successful, they are pushing the legal envelope following the end of Roe. Hawley is helping to pioneer a new frontier of abortion litigation targeting existing — sometimes longstanding — laws and regulations that help uphold abortion access.
