On Thursday, the US supreme court unanimously ruled that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine – a sock-puppet group of fanatically anti-choice doctors and busybodies – lacked standing to sue in the group’s challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the drug that is now used in more than 60% of American abortions. The court’s decision may seem like the end of this battle. It’s only the beginning.
The lawsuit in question had originally emerged from Amarillo, Texas, in a federal court that has become a destination for anti-choice litigants because Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and the sole judge hearing federal civil cases in the district, is a militant anti-abortion activist. Kacsmaryk made news when he used to case as a pretext to issue a nationwide injunction revoking FDA approval of the drug. The fifth circuit court, a radically rightwing appeals panel which has jurisdiction over Texas and which has repeatedly sought to push the supreme court to new heights of anti-abortion extremism, upheld most of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, but limited the case to challenges that the FDA made in 2016 and 2021 to make mifepristone more easily available.
