Supreme Court unanimously preserves access to abortion medication mifepristone

Former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee was declared the winner in his race for the Republican nomination for U.S. House in Nevada’s 4th Congressional District.

The Associated Press called the race — the last contested Nevada congressional race to be called — late Wednesday. In unofficial results posted Thursday afternoon, Lee had collected 48.44% of the vote to 45.13% received by David Flippo, his closest opponent.

Lee will face Democratic incumbent Stephen Horsford in the November general election.

Here’s how Nevada’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd Congressional District races shape up in November:

1st District: Incumbent Democratic Rep. Dina Titus vs. Republican challenger Mark Robertson

2nd District: Incumbent Republican Rep. Mark Amodei does not have a Democratic challenger

3rd District: Incumbent Democratic Rep. Susie Lee vs. Republican challenger Drew Johnson

The Supreme Court in a ruling Thursday unanimously rejected an attempt to restrict access to a medication that was used in about two-thirds of U.S. abortions last year, in its first reproductive rights decision since overturning Roe v. Wade two years ago.

While praising the decision, President Joe Biden signaled Democrats would continue to campaign heavily on abortion ahead of the November elections. “It does not change the fact that the right for a woman to get the treatment she needs is imperiled if not impossible in many states,” Biden said in a statement.

Democrats in Nevada’s congressional delegation, along with abortion advocates here, also welcomed the news but with mostly muted enthusiasm, noting there was more work to be done on the reproductive freedom front.

The case, brought by religious health care group Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, sought to dampen medical professionals’ ability to prescribe mifepristone, claiming the federal Food and Drug Administration had overly relaxed its regulation of the medication. The FDA approved mifepristone’s use in 2000 for pregnancies up to seven weeks, which was extended to 10 in 2016. The FDA also approved a generic version of the drug in 2019.

Justices ruled the alliance had no standing — the legal principle that requires plaintiffs to show they have suffered direct and concrete injuries in order to sue ­— to bring its claim to the court, even if its objections to the drug’s use were legitimate. The decision did not take on the pill’s morality or safety.

“The plaintiff doctors and medical associations are unregulated parties who seek to challenge FDA’s regulation of others,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.

“Specifically, FDA’s regulations apply to doctors prescribing mifepristone and to pregnant women taking mifepristone,” he wrote. “But the plaintiff doctors and medical associations do not prescribe or use mifepristone. And FDA has not required the plaintiffs to do anything or to refrain from doing anything.”

The mifepristone case began five months after a sharply divided Supreme Court — led by three justices appointed by President Donald Trump — overturned Roe in June 2022. Abortion opponents initially won a sweeping ruling nearly a year ago from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed jurist in Texas, that would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But its ruling sought to reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.

The high court is separately considering another abortion case, about whether a federal law on emergency treatment at hospitals overrides state abortion bans in rare emergency cases in which a pregnant patient’s health is at serious risk.

The mifepristone decision offered a sigh of relief for abortion advocates who feared the court would continue its deterioration of access to legal abortion.

“While this is the right decision, we understand that this is only one small victory in a series of attacks that continue to happen on abortion access in this country,” said Lindsey Harmon, president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom. “We can’t take anything for granted in a post-Dobbs world.”

Las Vegas-based company GenBioPro is the manufacturer of generic mifepristone and had filed a brief with the Supreme Court earlier in the year warning of “severe” consequences if the drug was restricted. GenBioPro CEO Evan Masingill was also less comforted in the ruling and said threats to abortion care and access to mifepristone were still rampant.

“While the Supreme Court’s ruling maintains access to mifepristone for medical abortions, the threat to mifepristone’s well-established FDA approval and the FDA’s regulatory authority remains,” Masingill said in a statement. “We know politically motivated attacks from extremists against mifepristone will not end here.”

Nevada’s five Democrats in Congress also offered muted reactions to the decision.

U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford was the most effusive, calling the decision “a monumental win for reproductive rights & justice” in a post on X.

Reps. Susie Lee and Dina Titus, along with Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, were more guarded in their comments.

In a post on her X account about the decision, Lee wrote, “Good. But this fight is far from over.”

Titus, on X, wrote, “While today’s SCOTUS decision preserving access to mifepristone is a welcome one, make no mistake — Republicans will continue to attack reproductive rights at every level of government across the U.S.”

Rosen was combative in comments released by her office: “While today’s decision is good news for reproductive freedoms, the Supreme Court has not fully closed the door on future attempts to further restrict abortion access across our nation. We know the anti-choice extremists who pushed to overturn Roe v. Wade won’t stop until they succeed in banning women’s access to abortion care. We cannot allow that to happen, which is why it is more critical than ever to restore Roe and protect reproductive rights in federal law.”

Cortez Masto, too, warned that the fight for abortion rights was far from finished, saying in a statement, “While today is a victory for women’s reproductive health care, anti-choice politicians across the country are continuing to threaten women’s rights. I’ll keep doing everything I can to protect women’s reproductive freedom, and that includes ensuring access to mifepristone nationwide.”

And the fight continues.

A ballot initiative that would enshrine in the Nevada Constitution the right to an abortion is currently under review by state officials after supporters said they collected more than double therequired signatures.

Medication-induced abortions have increasingly become the preferred method of abortion in the United States, accounting for 63% of all abortions in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The increase has been steep since the drug’s introduction in 2000, accounting for 24% of abortions in 2005 and 53% in 2020.

Mifepristone works by blocking the progesterone, a hormone that allows pregnancy to continue, in the body, according to the FDA. The drug is used in tandem with another medication, misoprostol, to end pregnancies up to 10 weeks and is also approved by the FDA.

Harmon said the upcoming election, with many anti-abortion candidates on the ballot, has created little opportunity for celebration of the court’s ruling.

“A win today on a procedural decision not does not mean that we can take our foot off the gas,” Harmon said. “We need to continue to fight this at every level of the court, in every state constitution, in every decision we make about the candidates we elect to office in November.”