On Monday, Trump administration officials asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit from several red states seeking to restrict the sale of the abortion drug mifepristone. The Justice Department's rationale closely mirrored arguments made earlier by the Biden administration, indicating that while Trump has sought to radically diverge from Biden-era priorities, abortion restrictions may not be one of them.
In 2022, anti-abortion groups sued to challenge a decision by the Food and Drug Administration allowing the drug to be prescribed via telehealth and sent by mail. The original suit argued that mifepristone—which is usually prescribed to induce an abortion in conjunction with the drug misoprostol—isn't safe and that allowing the drug to be mailed violates a 19th century anti-obscenity law.
Ligation in the case has been ongoing ever since and has now spanned multiple presidential administrations. Biden administration officials pushed back against the suit primarily by arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing. In a 2023 legal filing, Biden administration lawyers wrote that "plaintiffs ask this Court to upend that longstanding scientific determination based on speculative allegations of harm offered in support of claims and arguments that are untimely, unexhausted, and without merit." In 2024, the Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit, but Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho have since asked to revive the suit.
