The United States Department of Justice is calling for the dismissal of a case challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s changes to dispensing requirements for the abortion pill on procedural grounds nearly a year after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed a similar lawsuit on procedural grounds.
In a reply memorandum in support of a motion to dismiss filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas’ Amarillo Division on Monday, the DOJ maintained that Missouri, Idaho and Kansas do not have standing to bring a lawsuit challenging the changes to the dispensing requirements for the abortion pill in the federal court because “their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas.”
“If the States were to file their own suit in this District, that suit could not proceed due to improper venue,” the memorandum declared. “To justify continued litigation here, the States instead rely on the original plaintiffs’ lawsuit seeking to challenge FDA’s actions. But the Supreme Court unanimously concluded that those plaintiffs lacked standing, and they have now voluntarily dismissed all of their claims.”
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The memorandum added that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that it and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and four individual doctors did not have standing to sue the FDA over its relaxing of requirements for dispensing the abortion pill.
Missouri, Idaho and Kansas filed a motion to intervene in the original lawsuit in November 2023, seven months before the unanimous Supreme Court decision.
In addition to maintaining that the states did not have standing to intervene, the memo contended that the challenges to the 2016 changes to the requirements for dispensing the abortion pill are past the six-year statute of limitations. The DOJ stressed that the states “are free to pursue their claims in a District where [the] venue is proper,” suggesting that the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss was not a rejection of the efforts to challenge the abortion pill but was simply procedural.
The litigation against the abortion pill challenged changes made during the Obama administration, enabling medical professionals other than doctors to dispense the abortion pill and changes made during the Biden administration removing the requirement that those seeking the abortion pill first see a doctor in person.
Efforts to challenge the dispensing requirements for the abortion pill stem from concerns about the drug’s safety and harms to women’s health. Just last week, the Ethics and Public Policy Center released a report finding that over 10% of women who took the abortion pill between 2017 and 2023 experienced adverse effects.
While 5.68% of women who took the abortion pill experienced adverse events characterized as “other abortion-specific complications,” significant shares of women faced emergency room visits (4.73%), hemorrhages (3.31%), surgical abortions (2.84%) and infection (1.34%) after taking it. The report highlighted how the use of the abortion pill has skyrocketed since its approval by the FDA in 2000 to a point where two-thirds of abortions nationwide involve the use of the abortion drug.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
