Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is hopeful a judge will reject the Trump administration’s request to pause her lawsuit seeking to reinstate regulations of the abortion pill.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a federal court to pause Louisiana’s case against the Food and Drug Administration while the agency conducts a safety review into the abortion drug mifepristone.
“I am certainly hopeful that he will not accept the Department of Justice’s position, because they haven’t given any concrete reason to believe they are actually moving forward,” Murrill told The Daily Signal.
The state of Louisiana and resident Rosalie Markezich filed a lawsuit in 2025 challenging a Biden-era rule allowing abortion drugs to be dispensed to women through the mail without seeing a doctor first.
Markezich says her boyfriend coerced her into taking abortion pills which he ordered from a doctor in California. While Louisiana law prohibits abortions in almost all cases, the lack of an in-person dispensing requirement on the drugs allowed him to obtain the drugs out-of-state through the mail.
The administration’s request for a pause says that studies like the abortion pill safety review “often take approximately a year or more to conduct,” though the FDA’s current plan is to complete the study “sooner than that timeframe.”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told The Daily Signal in a statement that the agency “remains committed to advancing President Trump’s pro-life agenda, including through dismissing criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against peaceful pro-life advocates targeted by the previous administration, and using the FACE Act to protect pro-life pregnancy centers.”
“In this filing, the Department of Justice simply requested more time from the court for the FDA to complete its review of mifepristone REMS,” the spokesperson added. A Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, is a protocol for the FDA to ensure safe usage of higher-risk drugs.
“As the Supreme Court recognized in a unanimous ruling less than two years ago, it is the role of the FDA – not the federal courts – to evaluate drug safety data and impose appropriate precautions.”
However, because the Trump FDA has not taken steps to initate the rulemaking process to change the Biden-era rule, there’s no reason to pause the case, Murrill said.
“If they had taken action toward withdrawing the Biden-era rules, which they can and should do, and have even indicated they’re willing to do, since they’ve conceded these rules need to be withdrawn, then I think we might all agree it would make sense to pause the litigation while they carried out that rulemaking process,” she said.
“But there’s been no movement to initiate that process, so there’s no reason to pause the case,” she continued.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious liberty law firm, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the state of Lousiana.
“I remain confident that we will succeed in moving forward with this litigation because courts have an unflagging obligation to hear the cases presented before them,” ADF senior counsel Erik Baptist said.
“The Trump administration is trying to pause this case, but I think it will be to no avail, given that countless women and unborn babies would be unlawfully harmed while waiting years for the FDA to do something.”
The entry of abortion pills into Lousiana from across state lines is “dangerous,” “illegal,” and “unethical,” Murrill said. A study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 11% of women who take the abortion drug experience “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event” within 45 days.
“We’ve seen the harms that have come to women from the kind of unrestricted flooding of these pills into our states, and we’ve had numerous cases show up in emergency rooms,” she said. “I have more than one case where women took them at 20 weeks, which is very dangerous. We’ve got proof that they do not identify the recipient of the pills, nor do they identify the prescriber or the pharmacy.”
“You get online, and you fill out that form, and it doesn’t matter who you are, you can get these pills, and then you can do whatever you want with them,” she continued. “It’s just an very unusual situation for any kind of medication that has a black box warning on it, like this does.”
While the DOJ is saying it requested a pause because the legal case could “affect the review process,” Tom McCluskey, government affairs director at CatholicVote, thinks there’s more to the story.
“It does seem to coincide with other decisions coming from the White House that they want to wait till the midterms, or not deal with it at all,” he told The Daily Signal.
“While I am appreciative of the groundbreaking pro-life moves this administration continues to do, the dangers and outreach of the abortion drug can erase all movements forward,” he continued.
