With the midterm elections looming like a final exam nobody studied for, Republicans are already juggling an unpopular war, inflation that makes everything cost a small fortune, and President Trump’s approval ratings that have seen better days. Now, the abortion pill debate has added another flaming hoop for the administration to jump through.
Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade - which had been the law of the land since 1973 - abortion remains widely available, and the annual number of abortions has actually ticked up slightly. Much of that is thanks to abortion pills. The Food and Drug Administration has so far stuck with a Biden-era decision allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail.
But a lawsuit from the state of Louisiana now threatens that access, and the Trump administration has responded with a silence so deafening you’d think they were in a library. The case reached the Supreme Court this month, where a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the telemedicine-and-mail policy. After emergency appeals from two mifepristone manufacturers, the Supreme Court paused that ruling twice, and then last week restored telemedicine and mail access indefinitely while litigation continues in the lower courts.
Through all this legal ping-pong, President Trump - who calls himself “the most pro-life president in history” - has stayed mum. His Justice Department, whose job is to defend the FDA in such cases, declined to submit a brief to the Supreme Court. That’s a move so unusual it raised eyebrows from coast to coast.
“That they’re the folks who are most directly affected by the litigation and they’re not filing anything - that is shocking,” said Samuel Bagenstos, who was general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden. “I think it reflects this very difficult political position that the Trump administration is in.”
In other words, the administration is caught between a pro-life base and a legal headache, and they’ve chosen to play the world’s most awkward game of hide and seek.