A federal judge has paused a case that Louisiana brought against the abortion pill mifepristone as the FDA reviews the drug’s safety.
U.S. District Judge David Joseph wrote in an order that the “equities and the public interest weigh heavily in favor of FDA completing the job that the law requires it to do.” He explained, “Put differently, at this juncture, it is the completion of FDA’s promised good faith, evidence-based, and expeditious review of the mifepristone [review], not ‘government by lawsuit,’ that this Court finds to be in the public interest.”
“FDA’s review should be conducted and completed free from judicial interference,” the order read.
In February, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, alongside Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), led dozens of Republican lawmakers in filing a brief supporting Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s lawsuit against the abortion pill.
The brief stands in support of Murrill’s 2025 lawsuit targeting the removal of the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion drugs. The filing calls for the FDA to suspend the Biden-era 2023 policy. According to the lawmakers, “The change was made precisely so that abortionists in pro-abortion states could prescribe and mail abortion drugs to women or girls in pro-life states with tighter regulations on these drugs.”
A 2025 study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 1 in 10 women who take mifepristone to induce abortions experience severe complications, a number at least 22 times as high as reported on the drug’s label.
The study, described by the think tank as the “largest-known study of the abortion pill,” found that “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.” It explained that the “real-world” rate of the serious adverse events is “at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of ‘less than 0.5 percent’ in clinical trials reported on the drug label.”
