What’s next for abortion pill legal battle as Supreme Court decision maintains access

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Welcome to the NewsHour. The abortion pill mifepristone will stay on the market for now after a highly anticipated supreme court decision maintains the status quo for the drug's access. The justices issued a decision late tonight as lower court challenges to the abortion pill continue. For more on what this means, we're joined by our national correspondent, John Yang. John, it's great to have you here. President Biden released a statement moments ago welcoming this announcement. Tell us what the court decided.

• John Yang:

  The court said essentially, as you said, that mifepristone will remain available while the the challenge to the Texas court ruling, the Texas federal court ruling that invalidated the 2000 approved FDA approval of mifepristone moves its way through the through the appeals process. There were two noted dissents. Justice Alito wrote a dissent. Justice Thomas dissented, but did not join that dissent. So we presume it was a 7 to 2 decision with justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kagan, and the Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three liberal justices.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, tell us more about the Alito dissent, because as I understand it, that one was pretty pretty vigorous.

• John Yang:

  It is pretty vigorous, He says, that they don't deserve they don't qualify under the law for this this stay, because he says that there's no they didn't prove that there would be any irreparable harm during this period. He wrote his concluding line was that this state simply refuses to take a step that has not been shown as necessary to avoid the threat of any real harm during the presumably short period at issue. I think abortion rights advocates would point out that this ignores the fact that the one of the things that the the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did was change the the effectiveness of precedent for him from ten weeks to seven weeks, seven weeks at a point at which some people may not be aware that they're pregnant and that pregnant people can't freeze their pregnancy in the same way that this is freezing, taking it off the market.

• Geoff Bennett:

  What does this decision this day mean for access to mifepristone in the short term?

• John Yang:

  In the short term, everything stays the same after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe versus Wade. 12 states have made total bans on abortion. There are seven more that are trying to ban it, but are being blocked by the courts. Five have severe restrictions. If this had succeeded, if they had blocked the access to mifepristone even in the states where abortion is totally legal, it would have been hard to do more than half the abortions in America performed by with medication, and this would have severely restricted the access to abortion across America, even in those states where it's legal. So now the appeals process moves forward. There will be a hearing in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Wednesday, May 17th. No matter who wins in that one, it's almost virtually certain to come back to the Supreme Court and appeal.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, I was going to ask you that. What happens next in this in this legal battle? It's going to work its way back, as you say.

• John Yang:

  It will. And this time they're going to have to rule on the merits of the case, as they say, on the whether or not the FDA's actions were valid or not.

• Geoff Bennett:

  John Yang, thank you so much for that reporting. And we'll, of course, watch your coverage tomorrow and PBS News Weekend. Thanks for being with us.