Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Scoffs at Flimsy Abortion Pill Argument

With the exception of Samuel Alito, the justices indicated that challengers to the FDA’s mifepristone approval lack standing.

March 27, 2024 at 10:30 AM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Signs outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Photographer: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Note: On June 13, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the challenge to mifepristone, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing — as Noah Feldman predicted when the case was argued.

Abortion is back at the Supreme Court. The case contests decisions by the Food and Drug Administration to make the drug mifepristone available by mail and via telemedicine. But at oral argument on Monday, the court that overturned Roe v. Wade seemed poised to reject the arguments of the pro-life Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

No, the conservative justices haven’t suddenly discovered a new sympathy for the right to choose. Rather, several of the conservatives, alongside the court’s three liberals, appeared to believe that the doctors represented by the Alliance lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA’s decisions because they aren’t concretely harmed by the availability of mifepristone.