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The Trump administration on Monday signaled it will continue the Biden administration’s defense of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations allowing patients to access a widely used abortion pill by mail.
The Justice Department argued in a filing in Texas federal court that a group of three Republican-controlled states lacked the standing to challenge the rules, accusing Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho of trying to “piggyback” onto a lawsuit the Supreme Court already rejected.
The administration also claimed that if the states were able to challenge the abortion rules in Texas court, it could open the door for states to challenge any agency guidance based on “highly abstract” interests. That’s a likely topic of concern for the Trump White House given the scores of lawsuits from states the administration is facing over its own policies.
The rules at issue in the suit come from a pair of 2016 and 2021 changes regulating access to mifepristone, a drug used in a majority of U.S. abortions, allowing patients to use the pills up to 10 weeks into their pregnancy, and to access the medicine by mail without first seeing a clinician in person.
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of anti-abortion doctors, originally challenged both the FDA’s approval of the drug and rules governing its access. But the Supreme Court last year threw out the suit for lack of standing, and the alliance dismissed its claims.
However, the three states sought to take over the suit, and the Biden administration motioned to dismiss the challenge again in January, shortly before Trump took office.
The states argue they have a right to sue over the FDA rules because, among other things, they could have to pay for Medicaid claims based on the small percentage of individuals who go to the emergency room for complications from the medicine.
Previous administrations were guilty of “creating a nationwide, abortion-by-mail scheme—devoid of adequate safety regulations,” the states argued in a February brief.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump said: “It’s always been my commitment” that the FDA would not strip away access to the abortion pill.
In February, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said the Department of Health and Human Services had plans to investigate the treatment.
Advocates argued the administration’s defense was the bare minimum.
“The Trump Administration should not get a gold star for continuing to highlight the glaring legal flaws in Missouri’s case – they could not do otherwise with a straight face,” Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told The Independent in a statement, pointing to “decades of scientific evidence” backing mifepristone’s safety.
“If, moving forward, the Trump administration stops defending the FDA’s evidence-based decisions on mifepristone or orders the FDA to reconsider its regulations, that would tank the FDA’s credibility and betray President Trump’s campaign promise not to further interfere with abortion access.”
Alex Woodward contributed reporting to this story.
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