On Monday, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice sided with the Biden administration’s defense of the abortion pill mifepristone. The decision came as a shock from the anti-abortion administration. The case titled State of Missouri v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is an amended form of the 2025 case Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, was taken all the way to the Supreme Court by anti-abortion advocates attempting to challenge the FDA’s regulations of the abortion pill.
Abortion Pill Regulations
Experts say the move could be a political move to delay the ongoing dispute over abortion care. During former President Joe Biden’s time in the White House, his administration defended the FDA and filed a motion to have the lawsuit dismissed back in January. The deadline for a response brief in support of the Trump administration’s motion was Monday.
Trump Administration Brief
In a 15-page brief, the Trump administration brief read that the three states “cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the states’ own claims have no connection to this district.”
“The States are free to pursue their claims in a district where venue is proper … but the States’ claims before this Court must be dismissed or transferred pursuant to the venue statute’s mandatory command,” the brief adds.
“At a minimum, the state’s challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is time-barred because the states sought to intervene more than six years after FDA finalized those actions,” the Department of Justice also wrote. That case made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, which made a ruling in June of 2024 that anti-abortion organizations lacked standing to present the case.
Idaho, Kansas, & Missouri
The states of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri want a federal judge to let them intervene in a case so they can make the argument that the FDA erred in 2016 when it updated its guidelines for mifepristone.
The states want the changes to the use of the abortion pill to be reverted to what it was from 2000 to 2016. By doing so, that would cap medication abortion at 7 weeks’ gestation instead of the current 10 weeks (about two and a half months).
The old guidelines also said that any patient seeking medication abortion needed to see a doctor three times in person and no longer be able to do it via telehealth. The old guidelines also prevented it from being mailed to the patient.
How the Abortion Pill Works
The abortion pill Mifepristone is an oral tablet used to end a pregnancy that is 10 weeks along or less. The abortion pill was first approved by the FDA back in September of 2008 as Mifeprex and was FDA-approved as Mifepristone in February of 2012.
Mifepristone prevents a pregnancy by blocking progesterone, a hormone essential for pregnancy. Simply put, abortion pills prompt the body to have a miscarriage, which is a process that women naturally experience at home. Thousands of women in states with abortion bans have received the abortion pills in the mail from states that have laws protecting prescribers.
“People … are using the various mechanisms to get pills that are out there,” Drexel University law professor David Cohen said. This “is not surprising based on what we know throughout human history and across the world: People will find a way to terminate pregnancies they don’t want.”
