The New Yorker:

The Supreme Court has, for now, refrained from restricting access to urgently needed abortions.

By Jessica Winter

Two years after the Supreme Court abolished the constitutional right to abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Justices have issued a pair of decisions that may appear faintly reassuring amid a bleak landscape for reproductive rights in the U.S. In Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, issued earlier this month, the Court unanimously rejected a challenge from a group of anti-abortion physicians to efforts made by the F.D.A. to ease access to mifepristone, the drug used in medication abortion. (The agency had in recent years permitted mifepristone to be administered later in pregnancy and ended the in-person requirement for prescribing the drug.) The A.H.M.’s complaint rested primarily on what Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the Court, politely called “complicated causation theories”: the organization argued—without substantial evidence—that the F.D.A.’s changes made medication abortion less safe, which increased the odds of patients having complications, which made it more likely that they might need emergency care, which heightened the chance that a doctor who is opposed to abortion on moral grounds might have to provide that care. None of these doctors had actually faced this moral conundrum, and nothing in this daisy chain of contingencies, the Court ruled, amounted to standing under Article III of the Constitution.

The other abortion-related case on the Court’s lineup, Moyle v. United States, centered on the conflict between Idaho state law, which prohibits abortion except to avert the death of the pregnant person, and the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (emtala), which requires that hospitals receiving Medicaid funding provide stabilizing emergency care to any patient who is at the broader risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions.” “What falls in the gap between” the two laws, Elena Kagan wrote, “are cases in which continuing a pregnancy does not put a woman’s life in danger, but still places her at risk of grave health consequences, including loss of fertility.” Idaho disagreed, arguing in a brief that emtala would turn emergency rooms into “federal abortion enclaves governed not by state law, but by physician judgment, as enforced by the United States’s mandate to perform abortions on demand.”

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