Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit in 2023 along with attorneys general from Kansas and Idaho
By: Jennifer Shutt
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice wrote in a legal filing released Monday that three GOP-led states attempting to overturn federal prescribing guidelines for medication abortion have sought to keep a case going in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The filing is significant since it appears to indicate the Trump administration will defend the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision nine years ago to broaden access to mifepristone. The Biden administration also sought to keep the newer prescribing guidelines intact.
Idaho, Kansas and Missouri want a federal judge to let them intervene in a case that’s already been to the U.S. Supreme Court, so they can argue the FDA erred when it updated prescribing guidelines for mifepristone in 2016.
The goal is to get those changes thrown out so use of mifepristone, one of two pharmaceuticals used in medication abortion, reverts to what was in place between 2000 and 2016.
That would cap medication abortion at seven weeks gestation instead of the current 10 weeks and patients seeking medication abortions would need to attend three, in-person doctor appointments. Medication abortion would no longer be available via telehealth and it could no longer be legally mailed to patients.
The Trump administration wrote in a 15-page brief filed with the U.S. District Court for Northern District of Texas that the three states “cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the States’ own claims have no connection to this District.”
“The States are free to pursue their claims in a District where venue is proper … but the States’ claims before this Court must be dismissed or transferred pursuant to the venue statute’s mandatory command,” the brief adds.
The Department of Justice also wrote that at “a minimum, the States’ challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is time-barred because the States sought to intervene more than six years after FDA finalized those actions.”
Original suit began in 2022
The original case challenging the federal government’s 2000 approval and current prescribing guidelines for medication abortion began in November 2022 when anti-abortion groups filed their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Northern District of Texas.
That case worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June 2024 that the anti-abortion organizations lacked standing to bring the case.
But Idaho, Kansas and Missouri state officials sought to intervene in the case before it reached the high court and have tried to keep the challenge to the 2016 prescribing guidelines moving forward.
The Department of Justice wrote in its brief that there were several reasons the case shouldn’t continue in the Northern District of Texas.
Among those is that the three states “fail to identify any actual or imminent controversy over whether any of their laws are preempted” and that they lack Article III standing since “they failed to exhaust their claims; and their challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is outside the six-year statute of limitations.”
The case is assigned to Judge Matthew Joseph Kacsmaryk, who overturned the FDA’s original 2000 approval of mifepristone in April 2023 in the original lawsuit.
That ruling never took effect as the original lawsuit worked its way through the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and up to the Supreme Court.