Carter Sherman

Last year, Louisiana sued the FDA over the fact that it allows abortion providers to mail mifepristone.

And on May 1st, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to pause mail order access to Mifepristone while litigation in Louisiana's case plays out.

Absolutely.

So what that means is that under the Fifth Circuit's ruling, no one can get access to mail order Mifepristone, including people who live in states that don't ban abortion, people who live in blue states who might think that their abortion rights are protected.

That argument has entered the chat, shall we say, but it's not really a good faith argument.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are incredibly well-researched.

More than 100 studies conducted across more than a dozen countries have found that when you use these two drugs to end a pregnancy, it is a safe and effective abortion method in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Now, the thing to understand here is that it is possible to have a misoprostol-only abortion and just use that second drug in the regimen.

But it tends to be less safe and less effective.

But abortion providers have said that if they're not allowed to mail mifepristone anymore, they'll send people misoprostol-only.

Well, no.

Basically what the Supreme Court did is they just punted.

They just kicked the can down the road.

And presumably they might want to avoid having this argument in open court until after the midterms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think a lot about this woman I spoke to in the summer of 2021.

I was working on a story then called The Last Summer of Roe v. Wade.

And I asked her why she wasn't worried about the erosion of abortion rights.