Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has temporarily extended an order that maintains nationwide access to the abortion pill mifepristone by mail and through telehealth visits.
The administrative stay due to expire Monday will now stay in place until Thursday at 5 p.m. ET. Alito didn’t elaborate on the decision.
The Supreme Court is considering an emergency application by pharmaceutical companies that produce mifepristone to lift a lower court’s ruling barring the drug from being dispensed by telehealth providers or distributed by mail as litigation continues.
The state of Louisiana, which bans abortion at all stages of pregnancy with limited exceptions, originally brought the case in a bid to block mail-order access to the abortion pill, alleging federal regulators did not properly consider safety risks when discontinuing an in-person doctor visit requirement.
In this April 13, 2023, file photo, packages of Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic, in Rockville, Md.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, FILE
Drug makers, public health organizations and abortion rights advocates insist legally mandated reviews were conducted and that the drug has a lower adverse effects rate than penicillin and Viagra.
Mifepristone became a target for lawsuits after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In 2024, the justices unanimously rejected a similar legal challenge to mifepristone, concluding that the doctors and anti-abortion groups who sued over the drug did not have standing.
Medication abortion accounted for nearly two-thirds of abortions in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health. The oral drug is typically used in combination with another drug, misoprostol, to induce an abortion or to help manage an early miscarriage, up to 10 weeks’ gestation.
