“This decision means the ball is squarely in the next administration’s court,” said Roger Severino, who oversees abortion policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation and led abortion-related initiatives in the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump. “It’s up to the next administration to restore some semblance of safety to this largely unregulated regime of chemical abortion.”
As President Biden has repeatedly pledged to safeguard access to abortion pills — which leading medical associations agree are safe and effective — Trump has tried to distance himself from the issue. The former president, who appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, announced this spring that the issue should be left to the states — a position he reiterated Thursday morning when meeting with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The Trump campaign sought to quickly move on from the ruling Thursday, arguing that the matter was settled by the courts. “The Supreme Court has unanimously decided 9-0. The matter is settled,” Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said. “This election is about correcting the weakness, failures and dishonesty of the Biden crime family.”
The Biden administration has stressed Trump’s antiabortion track record and his role in overturning Roe. Leaders in Biden’s campaign quickly sounded the alarm after the Supreme Court decision, emphasizing that Trump would have significant power to crack down on abortion pills if he wins.
“This case, brought on by Donald Trump’s allies, was only one tactic in a broader relentless strategy to strip away explicitly protecting freedom everywhere in this country,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “If Trump regains power in November, Trump’s allies will be ready to deploy their plans to ban abortion access nationwide without the help of Congress or the court.”
Antiabortion advocates said Thursday that they remained hopeful that Trump would crack down on abortion pills if he returns to office, though there is no public evidence that such a promise has been made explicitly.
“What I have heard, which seems likely to me, is what the Trump administration would do is repeal the Biden regulations and go back to the Trump policy,” said James Bopp Jr., the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee.
During the Trump administration, the Food and Drug Administration required medication abortion patients to have an in-person medical consultation before taking the pills — a policy that changed temporarily during the coronavirus pandemic and permanently in late 2021.
Antiabortion advocates have grown increasingly frustrated that the landmark 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning a right to abortion has done little to decrease the number of abortions nationwide — with more abortions occurring in 2023 than ever before. Experts say the rise of abortion pills has contributed significantly to that trend, with many women now able to access abortion by mail, including in states where the procedure is illegal.
In the case decided Thursday, the Supreme Court could have instructed the FDA to reimpose old restrictions on the medication, including the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit. But the justices chose not to address the merits of the case, instead issuing a unanimous decision on procedural grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the challenge.
Antiabortion advocates have been targeting abortion pills since Roe was overturned, quickly recognizing that the medication made abortion far easier to access. Many see a Republican president as the surest way to limit the number of people who are able to take the pills.
A strategy document published by the conservative Heritage Foundation in April 2023 calls on the next Republican administration to crack down significantly on abortion pills — urging the FDA to overhaul its policies on the medication, including the agency’s 2000 approval of mifepristone.
“The FDA should revisit chemical abortion — and be driven by the science and the law, and not take anything off the table,” said Severino, who wrote the chapter of the Heritage document, titled “Project 2025,” that deals with abortion pills.
Serious complications with the medication occur in fewer than 0.5 percent of cases, according to leading studies.
Many leaders in the antiabortion movement have been laser-focused on ensuring Trump selects staunch antiabortion advocates to lead several key agencies, including the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department.
“It’s the top of our agenda, the top of every letter we’ve sent to the president’s campaign: what his appointments will be to FDA, HHS and DOJ,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, one of the largest antiabortion groups.
Minutes before House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — a longtime antiabortion advocate — met with Trump on Thursday morning, Hawkins said she texted the speaker to remind him to emphasize the importance of those appointments in furthering the antiabortion agenda.
“Ask him to hit the weaponized agencies that are in support of abortion,” Hawkins said she wrote.
The leaders of these agencies might not be the only personnel a potential Trump administration chooses to change.
As part of his crusade against the federal bureaucracy Trump derides as the “deep state,” he has campaigned on plans to strip civil service protections from potentially tens of thousands of government employees, which could include the FDA. This “Schedule F” order — which he issued at the end of his first term but never had time to fully implement — would mean that government employees involved in policymaking would be reclassified as political appointees who could be arbitrarily fired and replaced with loyalists.
Trump and many within the Republican Party have struggled with how to talk about abortion since Roe was overturned, as abortion has continued to be a mobilizing issue for Democrats.
On Capitol Hill on Thursday, Trump said Republicans need to do a better job messaging on abortion than they did ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to several people who met with him.
Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said Trump specifically mentioned that Republicans need to “be very careful” about showing “respect for women and the choices that they have to make.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told reporters that the former president held a “very serious discussion about how Republicans are going to talk about abortion in the upcoming election.”
“President Trump reiterated his perspective that this is a state issue. He thought that gave members who have different views on this issue in our conference an ability to really localize it rather than having to talk about it in the broadest of national terms,” he said.
Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said the mifepristone case before the Supreme Court was probably only the beginning of the antiabortion fight against abortion pills.
If Trump wins, and appoints an antiabortion FDA commissioner, she said, “they’ll be able to work from the inside to do whatever they want.”
Beth Reinhard and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
This article was originally published by a www.washingtonpost.com . Read the Original article here. .