SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – Attorney General Sean D. Reyes joined an amicus brief, led by the State of Mississippi, to the Supreme Court of the United States in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA. This case challenges a series of changes and approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Association’s (FDA) over the Mifepristone drug for abortions.
Earlier this year, a pair of U.S. District Judges in competing federal circuits issued rulings for challenges to FDA approvals of Mifepristone across the past two decades that have served to expand access to the abortive drug. Both rulings were advanced to the respective appeals courts. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit narrowed the decision from the district court, ruling that the FDA’s approvals from 2016-current were allowable to litigate under the statute of limitations, but that the agency’s approval from the year 2000 was not. The Alliance seeks to overturn the FDA’s unlawful changes to processes, procedures, and administration of Mifepristone from 2016-current, as well as to include the 2000 changes in this case.
In their brief, the States argue that “the FDA’s flawed approval of Mifepristone has created an unlawful nationwide abortion-drug regime” and that “allowing the FDA’s unlawful regime to stand would undermine the public-interest determination properly made by states.”
As the coalition of attorneys general write, “The federal government claims that it has the power to make abortion drugs broadly accessible despite contrary determinations by States and despite laws that States have enacted to protect life, health, and safety in the use of those drugs. That claim is wrong. No federal law shows a ‘clear and manifest purpose’ to displace state law in this context. … States are thus entitled to enforce their laws against those involved in sending or receiving such drugs by mail.”
Joining Utah and Mississippi on this brief were the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Read the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA brief here.
Read the School District of Martinsville v. A.C. brief here.
