The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily restored broad access to the abortion pill mifepristone by mail.
Two companies that manufacture mifepristone asked the high court to “pause a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in a lawsuit by Louisiana that reinstated the requirement that the drug, which is used in about 60% of abortions nationwide, be dispensed only in person,” SCOTUSblog reports.
The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito allows women seeking an abortion to obtain the pill at pharmacies or by mail, without an in-person visit to a doctor, until May 11.
In the order, Alito instructed the FDA and Louisiana to respond by 5 p.m. on May 7 while the justices consider the drug companies’ request.
BREAKING: The Supreme Court restores access to abortion pill mifepristone through telehealth, mail and pharmacies. https://t.co/vZFyy470BC
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 4, 2026
SCOTUSblog shared further:
Nearly two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that doctors and medical groups opposed to abortion did not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s expansion of access to mifepristone.
The 2024 case, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, was filed in federal court in Texas by several individual doctors who are opposed to abortion on religious or moral grounds, as well as medical groups whose members are opposed to abortion. The plaintiffs asked U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to rescind both the FDA’s initial approval of the drug in 2000 and its 2016 and 2021 expansions of access to the drug, arguing that mifepristone is unsafe and that the process that the FDA used to approve the drug was flawed.
The FDA, as well as several leading medical groups, countered that, based on extensive evidence, mifepristone is safe and effective. Kacsmaryk, however, suspended the FDA’s approval of the drug and the agency’s later changes, made in 2016 and 2021, to the conditions on the use of the drug – which included allowing the drug to be used through the 10th week of pregnancy, allowing health-care providers who are not physicians to prescribe the drug, and permitting it to be prescribed without an in-person visit.
The FDA and Danco, which manufactures mifepristone, appealed to the 5th Circuit. The court upheld the part of Kacsmaryk’s ruling that rolled back the agency’s 2016 and 2021 changes that had expanded access to mifepristone.
In April 2023, the Supreme Court temporarily put the 5th Circuit’s ruling on hold, ensuring continued access to the drug. In June 2024, it reversed the lower court’s ruling and sent the case back to the lower courts.
“While mifepristone access returns to where it was on Friday morning, the whiplash and chaos that patients and providers are navigating have already had real consequences for real peoples’ lives and futures,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), according to NBC News.
“Mifepristone is usually taken with a second drug, misoprostol, for abortions. According to the FDA label on mifepristone, the combination completes medical abortion 97.4% of the time,” the Associated Press stated.
The US Supreme Court temporarily paused a lower court decision that would require patients to visit a healthcare provider in person to get a widely used abortion pill. Listen to that and the latest stories on Bloomberg News Now. https://t.co/kjRFpcMjNJ
— Bloomberg (@business) May 4, 2026
NBC News has more:
Medication abortion is harder for states to regulate than surgical procedures, especially if pills are available through the mail.
The drugmakers say that, like in the earlier case, Louisiana does not have legal standing to bring the claims.
In their lawsuit against the FDA, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that opposes abortion, alleged that data did not support lifting the in-person dispensing requirement.
“Big abortion pharma claims they need an emergency stay because they will lose massive amounts of money if they can’t kill more babies quickly and efficiently by mail without medical oversight,” Murrill said in a statement after Monday’s Supreme Court action. “The administrative stay is temporary, and I am confident life and the law will win in the end.”
In January, the FDA requested the case be paused until the agency finished conducting its own safety review of mifepristone. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commissioned the review last year in response to a report that claimed to find a higher rate of serious complications from mifepristone than reported by the FDA.
But researchers who study reproductive health said the report amounted to junk science and exaggerated the risks of the medication. The report was released online by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. It was not peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal.
A district judge in Louisiana agreed to the FDA’s request to pause the case last month before the appeals court stepped in.