The Supreme Court temporarily restored access to one of the primary ways abortion is administered in the U.S. on Monday, as it paused a lower court ruling which had banned providers from prescribing abortion pills through pharmacies or by mail through telehealth services without an in-person doctor’s visit.
An order signed by Justice Samuel Alito stayed an appeals court order last week blocking access to abortion pills through mail order and pharmacies without a previous in-person doctor’s visit.
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An order signed by Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, which had blocked abortion providers from writing prescriptions for abortion drugs without an in-person doctor’s visit.
The appeals court had sided on Friday with Louisiana, which had argued that mail-order drugs subverted the state’s ban on medical abortions.
In the ruling written by Trump-appointed Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan, the appeals court found that allowing this access to abortion drugs “cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy” that life begins at conception.
Abortion pill manufacturers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court on Saturday, and Alito signed the order because he is the justice assigned to handle emergency appeals in Louisiana.
The Supreme Court’s temporary pause is set to expire on May 11, but the stay could be extended after the court reviews briefs requested by Thursday.
Abortion drugs like mifepristone account for the majority of abortions in the United States, with the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute finding it was the method for 65% of abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and since then Republican-led states have enacted bans and restrictions on abortion, while some Democratic-leaning states passed “shield laws” aimed at protecting physicians prescribing abortion drugs to out-of-state patients from jurisdictions where the procedure is banned. The Supreme Court has already upheld mifepristone from a conservative challenge once. Mifepristone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, but anti-abortion medical groups sued the agency in 2022, attempting to overturn its approval. The Supreme Court sided with the FDA in a 2024 ruling, finding the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the drug’s approval and upheld its previous safety findings.
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