Ajit Karn
The Supreme Court of the United States issued a temporary stay on Friday to ensure that a common abortion pill remains widely available while it determines whether to issue a formal stay.
The temporary postponement will expire on Wednesday at midnight.
The Media reported that Justice Samuel Alito granted the government’s request for an emergency stay in order to provide the justices with additional time to consider the germane issues. Alito also stated that the entire court will render a decision by Wednesday.
Notably, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s decision to revoke the authorization of mifepristone, a medication used in roughly half of all abortions in the United States.
The organizations contesting the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug had until Tuesday at noon to submit their brief, according to Judge Alito, the court official in charge of supervising the appeals court whose decision is in question, as reported by The New York Times.
The decision was made in response to an emergency application submitted by the Biden administration on Friday morning requesting the involvement of the justices.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States had recently authorized the shipment and distribution of mifepristone to patients between seven and ten weeks of pregnancy, but the appeals court imposed numerous restrictions on its use.
According to Al Jazeera, after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, which terminated the US Constitution’s protection of the right to an abortion, anti-abortion rights organizations have focused on the availability of abortion drugs such as mifepristone.
Since then, other Republican-governed states have imposed stringent abortion restrictions.
A federal magistrate in Texas issued an order on Friday that would have temporarily halted the FDA’s approval of mifepristone while he reviewed legal arguments concerning the medication’s availability.
However, the judge delayed his ruling for seven days so that the federal government could submit an appeal.
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Less than two hours later, a federal court in the state of Washington ruled that the FDA must maintain access to abortion medications in more than a dozen states with Democratic governors.
