Medication Abortion Gets Another Defender in Court
Pharma companies understand these attacks are about more than mifepristone.

This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.
The fight over mifepristone access took on a new form last week. Attorneys representing GenBioPro, the manufacturer of generic mifepristone—one of the two drugs used for medication abortions in the United States—filed a motion to intervene and defend its product from the conservative legal movement’s latest quackery . The case, Missouri et al. v. FDA, was filed in Texas by conservative attorneys general from Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho looking to resurrect false claims that mifepristone is dangerous and should be either heavily regulated or removed from the market entirely to protect the state’s sovereign right to keep teens pregnant against their will. (Reminder: Mifepristone is safer than Tylenol.)
You may remember that the Supreme Court summarily and unanimously dismissed a similar challenge to mifepristone access last summer in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, finding that the advocacy group formed for the sole purpose of challenging medication abortion access lacked standing to pursue those claims. But, this is the conservative legal movement we are talking about, and they’re not the kind of folks to take a unanimous smackdown from the Roberts Court as anything other than a dare to try their luck again.
“Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the anti-science extremists bringing this case lacked standing, ideologically-driven far-right state attorneys general are continuing to weaponize our courts to try to push their agenda,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, who is also serving as counsel for the company, said in a statement announcing the motion to intervene. “Despite the overwhelming majority of Americans—including constituents of these attorneys general—supporting the legal right to abortion, these politicians remain determined to severely restrict access to a critical drug that women across America depend on. Their baseless attacks not only jeopardize the availability of mifepristone, but also threaten the integrity of our nation’s drug regulation system.”
That last sentence from Perryman is the real kicker.
Like many of the conservative legal movement’s targets, its attacks on mifepristone are about more than eroding abortion access wherever it can. They want to undermine the entire drug regulatory system in this country.
The next test here will be whether or not GenBioPro’s motion to intervene in the litigation is granted. There is no reason—except for pure politics and the fact that Trump Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is overseeing this case—why it shouldn’t be. Then, the real test of the conservative legal movement’s latest strategy to upend medication abortion access, along with our entire drug regulation system, begins.