ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
The U.S. Supreme Court has tossed out a challenge to the federal rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills. By unanimous vote, the Court said the anti-abortion doctors who challenged FDA regulations failed to show they had been harmed as they do not prescribe the medication. Essentially, they had no skin in the game. Joining us now to discuss the high court's unanimous opinion, is NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Good morning, Nina.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Good morning, Rob.
SCHMITZ: So Nina, how big of a deal is this case?
TOTENBERG: Well, you know, it's the first big case involving abortion since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, and it took an off-ramp, admittedly. But that off-ramp leaves in place the FDA rules and the changes that the agency has made in the last eight years to make abortion pills more accessible. So for instance, pills can be prescribed for up to 10 weeks instead of seven, and women can now get abortion pill prescriptions filled by mail or by pharmacies instead of having to go to a doctor's office. And as a result of these and other changes, abortion pills are now the most popular method of abortion with more than half the women terminating pregnancy using pills instead of surgical abortions. And this case was brought by a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. And today, that's a - they're an anti-abortion group of doctors. And today, the court unanimously said to the alliance that they had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show that they had suffered any concrete injury.
SCHMITZ: You know, you mentioned the off-ramp that the court took here on standing, but could this case come back later?
TOTENBERG: It could, and it may well do that. But if it did, it would have to be a really good case because by taking the off-ramp of standing in this case, the court avoided, at least for now, a challenge to the entire structure of the FDA's regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety. And that's a system that for decades has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation. That said, there were hints in this opinion today that, you know, it might be very hard to get standing. Not only does the federal law have an explicit conscience objection exception, ensuring that no doctor can be forced to participate in an abortion, but the court also rejected the, if not us, then who? If we can't challenge this, then who would? That argument didn't play today. Justice Kavanaugh, writing for the court, said in response to that argument, basically, too bad. The courts may be the wrong forum for challenging FDA rules. You may have to go to the president in the FDA or to Congress.
But Kavanaugh noted, since the founding of this country, American courts have limited their powers to cases in which someone can show a concrete injury or a likelihood of a concrete injury. And that just wasn't the case here, he said.
SCHMITZ: If the court rejected this unanimously on these grounds, how did it get to the court in the first place?
TOTENBERG: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, probably the most conservative appellate court in the country, upheld standing, struck down many of the rules. It has done similar things in a lot of other cases. And in the next few weeks, I suspect the Fifth Circuit will suffer some more reversals.
SCHMITZ: That's NPR's Nina Totenberg. Thanks, Nina.
TOTENBERG: Thank you.
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