Voices: The Supreme Court gears up for yet another abortion fight

The US Supreme Court is not even a year removed from its earth-shattering Dobbs v Jackson decision, which overturned the right to an abortion and triggered a political earthquake. Now the court is already gearing up for another fight on abortion.

Earlier this month, the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a ruling blocking the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristoe, a drug used to terminate pregnancies.

Then, last week, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans granted the Justice Department’s request to put District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling on hold. But the same ruling rolled back rules that the FDA made in 2016 meant to increase access to the drug. Those rules had made the drug accessible for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, but the appeals court’s ruling rolled it back to simply seven weeks, when many people do not know they are pregnant.

That teed up the next step when the Justice Department joined in an appeal to the US Supreme Court to roll back the initial ruling. Additionally, Danco Laboratories, the company that manufactures mifepristone, filed an amicus brief to kep the drug’s approval in place.

On Friday afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority in the Dobbs decision, issued a ruling saying that the Northern District of Texas’s ruling would be stayed until midnight on Wednesday.

I wrote last week about how about how Republicans in the House and Senate would not be able to wriggle out of the unchartered territory that an abortion pill ruling would create. But in a similar way, this would also create thorny terrain for the high court less than a year after its decision to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade decision.

Public opinion of the court nosedived after the Dobbs decision, as many people overwhelmingly disapproved of the court, with 48 per cent of Americans having an unfavourable view of the court while 49 per cent having an unfavourable view, according to a Pew Research Centre survey last year. In addition, the number of US adults who said that the court had too much power has tripled from August 2020 to 45 per cent, with 64 per cent of Democrats saying that the court has too much power.

This comes after Republicans have continuously played politics with the court, from blocking Merrick Garland from receiving even a confirmation hearing when Barack Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court; to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell getting rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch; to Mr McConnell going back on his word and confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

The Supreme Court siding with Judge Kacsmaryk would send a signal that it has become an explicitly ideological forum meant to execute the will of social conservatives. Tellingly, numerous pharmeceutical companies also filed amicus briefs arguing that the blocking of the drug’s approval would send their business practices into chaos.

On top of that, the court also faces a crisis of its own making ever since ProPublica published its first investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas’s connections with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow and how he has lived high on Mr Crow’s dime. The court will likely take no action to reprimand Mr Thomas, which only further tarnishes its image among Americans.