A prominent U.S. lawsuit to ban the abortion pill mifepristone has focused on the drug’s safety and approval process. But the outcome may ultimately rest on a different issue: whether Ingrid Skop, an anti-abortion doctor in Texas, and other physicians behind the lawsuit can justify suing in the first place.
Roe v Wade relied on a relatively novel interpretation of the 14th amendment, leaving it vulnerable to a SCOTUS who would allow challenges to their own precedence. Current court is scummy AF for overturning the precedent, and the legal theory they used in the majority decision for Dobbs v Jackson is shaky at best (no surprise, given it’s just a way for a politicized court to do what they’ve wanted for decades), but there’s at least some weird mental hoops you can jump through to justify it.
This case though? Slam dunk commerce win IMO. The federal government has the right to regulate interstate commerce, congress delegated authority of drugs to the FDA, and if congress wanted to explicitly limit access to mifepristone they could have overridden the FDA at any time. That’s assuming SCOTUS agrees the doctors have standing in the first place, and that’s tenuous at best too.
I don’t think our current SCOTUS cares about whether their rulings make them look bad or not, but I do think they care about making sure they have some legal foundation to avoid obvious looks of impropriety. I just don’t see any way they can twist the law with this case like they did with Jackson.