
The Trump administration asked a Texas judge on Monday to dismiss an ongoing federal lawsuit that seeks to restrict access to mifepristone, the first pill used in the medication-abortion regimen. While on its face the explicitly anti-abortion administration’s move against the three Republican-led states that brought the suit may come as a surprise, experts warn that the legal battle over abortion pills is far from over — and Donald Trump may still restrict access to mifepristone through other actions.
“The best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone,” abortion-law expert and University of California, Davis professor Mary Ziegler told the New York Times.
Post-Dobbs, terminating a pregnancy with pills has become the most common abortion method in the U.S., even in states that ban the procedure, thanks to the proliferation of telehealth services and online providers. This has made abortion opponents deeply committed to ending abortion-pill access through legislation and the courts. The case that the Trump administration is seeking to dismiss, State of Missouri v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was brought by Republican attorney generals in Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho in October. It is an amended complaint to FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which challenged the FDA’s two-decades-old approval of mifepristone. As you may remember, the Supreme Court rejected that lawsuit last summer, ruling that the anti-abortion plaintiffs in Alliance did not have standing to sue.
However, U.S. district-court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a controversial anti-abortion judge whom Trump appointed in his first term and who oversaw Alliance — allowed State of Missouri to proceed in January. The Biden administration filed a motion to dismiss the case before Trump took office; Monday was the deadline for the Trump administration to file a brief in support of the motion. In its filing, the Department of Justice didn’t defend the case on its merits. Instead, it argued that Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas have no standing to sue in Texas and can’t simply piggyback off the previous suit to keep the case before Kacsmaryk. The Trump administration said that “the States are free to pursue their claims in a District where venue is proper,” however. The Justice Department also argued that some of the FDA regulations that the attorney generals are targeting were implemented in 2016, well past the six-year time limit to sue, though its lawyers did not address the lawsuit’s requests to roll back more recent regulations from 2021 and 2023.
Abortion-law experts were generally skeptical about the DoJ’s actions. After all, the administration has already made a slew of moves to advance its agenda, including asking a court to dismiss another abortion-related case that it inherited from the Biden administration, signaling that the Trump White House would rather let women die than allow them to have emergency abortions.
“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 at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement. “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.”
The filing also speaks to the administration’s efforts to preserve executive power, Kaye told HuffPost. Since Trump’s return to the White House, Democratic-led states have sued his administration on a myriad of issues, including his attempts to end birthright citizenship, tariffs, and the dismantling of federal agencies. By saying that Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri lack standing in the mifepristone case, Trump’s DoJ could set a similar precedent for the rest of these legal challenges. (And if Trump does direct the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone, his administration could then argue that Democratic-led states have no standing to challenge those regulations.)
After taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump has generally characterized his position on abortion as wanting to “leave” the issue to the states, using a neat rhetorical trick to replace the term abortion ban with national minimum standard or national consensus. However, the future of abortion — including medication abortion — is at risk, considering how he has filled his administration with abortion opponents at the highest levels of government, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FDA commissioner Marty Makary, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
It’s worth noting that Makary in particular said at a conference last month that he has “no plans to take action” on reinstating restrictions on mifepristone for now, though he left the door open for future actions, depending on what new data surfaces about the drug. But since it was approved 25 years ago, study after study has found that the pill is safe — more so than penicillin, Tylenol, or Viagra — and effective. Still, days after Makary made those comments, a conservative think tank released a study purporting to have found that mifepristone is dangerous. That study’s conclusions rely on questionable and unscientific definitions of “medical complications,” but that didn’t stop Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri from contacting Makary and demanding he restore “critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone.” (Coincidentally, the senator is married to attorney Erin Hawley, who last year argued against the FDA’s approval of mifepristone at the Supreme Court.)
Don’t be fooled by the Trump administration’s request to dismiss State of Missouri. The filing is neither a real defense of abortion pills nor does it show that Trump has suddenly a vested interest in expanding abortion rights. Members of his administration and their allies have clearly outlined the many ways in which Trump can end or curb access to medication abortion without going through Congress, including reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions, and directing federal agencies to enforce the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that they argue can be used to prosecute people who mail abortion pills. It’s not a matter of whether these attacks will take place; it is a matter of when.
The Cut offers an online tool you can use to search by Zip Code for professional providers, including clinics, hospitals, and independent OB/GYNs, as well as for abortion funds, transportation options, and information for remote resources like receiving the abortion pill by mail. For legal guidance, contact Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or the Abortion Defense Network.