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    US supreme court to hear case involving anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center

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    The US supreme court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a New Jersey anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center operator’s bid to block the Democratic-led state’s attorney general from investigating whether it deceived women into believing it offered abortions.The justices took up an appeal by First Choice Women’s Resource Centers of a lower court’s ruling that the Christian faith-based organization must first contest Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s subpoena in state court before bringing a federal lawsuit challenging it.The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. Such centers do not advertise their anti-abortion stance, and abortion rights advocates have called them deceptive. The case provides a test of the ability of state authorities to regulate these businesses.First Choice, which has five locations in New Jersey, has argued that it has a right to bring its case in federal court because it was alleging a violation of its federal rights to free speech and free association under the first amendment of the US constitution. First Choice is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has brought other cases on behalf of anti-abortion plaintiffs including an effort to restrict distribution of the abortion pill that has since been taken over by Republican states.New Jersey is targeting First Choice because of its views, Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Erin Hawley said.“We are looking forward to presenting our case to the supreme court and urging it to hold that First Choice has the same right to federal court as any other civil rights plaintiff,” Hawley said in a statement.Platkin said that his office may investigate to ensure nonprofits are not deceiving residents and that First Choice has for years refused to answer questions about “potential misrepresentations they have been making, including about reproductive healthcare”.“First Choice is looking for a special exception from the usual procedural rules as it tries to avoid complying with an entirely lawful state subpoena, something the US Constitution does not permit it to do. No industry is entitled to that type of special treatment – period,” Platkin added.First Choice sued Platkin in New Jersey federal court in 2023 after the attorney general issued a subpoena seeking internal records including the names of its doctors and donors as part of an investigation into potentially unlawful practices. First Choice argued that there was no good cause for the subpoena, which it said chilled its first amendment rights.Platkin moved to enforce the subpoena in state court. Essex county superior court Judge Lisa Adubato granted that motion, finding that First Choice had not shown that the subpoena should be quashed at the outset of the investigation, but ordered the parties to negotiate a narrower subpoena and said that the constitutional issues could be litigated further going forward.The US district judge Michael Shipp then dismissed the federal case, finding that First Choice’s federal claim was not ripe because it could continue to make its constitutional claims in the state court and did not face any immediate threat of contempt.The Philadelphia-based third circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling in December 2024 upheld Shipp’s ruling, prompting First Choice to appeal to the justices.In asking the supreme court to hear the case, First Choice argued that federal civil rights law is intended to guarantee parties a federal forum to assert their constitutional rights. It said that forcing it to litigate in state court would effectively deny it that forum, since the constitutional claims would be decided before a federal court could ever hear them.Crisis pregnancy centers have also drawn the attention of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who in 2024 sued 11 centers for advertising abortion pill reversal, a treatment whose safety and effectiveness is unproven. That case remains pending. Several New York crisis pregnancy centers sued James and in August won an order allowing them to continue touting abortion pill reversal. More

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      Four States Ask F.D.A. to Lift Special Restrictions on Abortion Pill

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      The states consider it a move to force the F.D.A. to review and acknowledge extensive research showing the pill’s safety.In a strategy aimed at countering efforts to further restrict the abortion pill mifepristone, attorneys general of four states that support abortion rights on Thursday asked the Food and Drug Administration to do the opposite and lift the most stringent remaining restrictions on the pill.The petition filed by Massachusetts, New York, California and New Jersey might seem surprising given the opposition to abortion expressed by Trump administration officials. But the attorneys general consider it a move that would require the F.D.A. to acknowledge extensive scientific research that has consistently found mifepristone safe and effective, said an official with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office who worked on the filing and asked not to be named in order to share background information. It would also prevent the F.D.A. from changing mifepristone regulations while the petition is pending.The petition notes that at a May senate hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, responded to questions by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who opposes abortion, by saying he had ordered the F.D.A. to do a “complete review” of mifepristone.“We want to make sure that when F.D.A. is making these decisions that they have all the data in front of them, all of the really powerful data that show that mifepristone is safe” the Massachusetts official said.The F.D.A. is required to respond within 180 days by granting or denying the request, or saying it needs more time. In its responses, the agency must document its position, which could be useful in lawsuits, including one that the four states could file if their petition is denied.Mifepristone, which blocks a hormone necessary for pregnancy development, was approved for abortion in America in 2000. The F.D.A. imposed an additional regulatory framework called Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, on mifepristone. That framework has been used for only about 300 drugs, currently covering only about 60 medications.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Rescinds Biden Policy Requiring Hospitals to Provide Emergency Abortions

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      At issue is how to interpret a federal law barring hospitals from turning away poor or uninsured patients.The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it had revoked a Biden administration requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortions to women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned.The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the department led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was not a surprise. But it added to growing confusion around emergency care and abortions since June 2022, when the Supreme Court rescinded the national right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade.“It basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, said of the Trump administration’s move.The administration did not explicitly tell hospitals that they were free to turn away women seeking abortions in medical emergencies. Its policy statement said hospitals would still be subject to a federal law requiring them to provide reproductive health care in emergency situations. But it did not explain exactly what that meant.Mr. Gostin and other experts said the murky policy could have dire consequences for pregnant women by discouraging doctors from performing emergency abortions in states where abortions are banned or restricted.“We’ve already seen since the overturn of Roe that uncertainty and confusion tends to mean physicians are unwilling to intervene, and the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in pregnancy,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California-Davis and a historian of the American abortion debate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump rescinds Emtala guidance protecting women in need of emergency abortions

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      The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies – a move that comes amid multiple red-state court battles over the guidance.The guidance deals with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), which requires hospitals to stabilize patients facing medical emergencies. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance, which it issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted Emtala incorrectly.In its letter rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) “will continue to enforce Emtala, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy. CMS will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”Abortion rights supporters said on Tuesday that rescinding the Biden administration’s guidance will muddy hospitals’ ability to interpret Emtala and endanger pregnant patients’ lives. Since Roe’s collapse, dozens of women have come forward to say that they were denied medical treatment due to abortion bans. A reported five pregnant women have died after having their care denied or delayed, or being unable to access legal abortions.“This action sends a clear message: the lives and health of pregnant people are not worth protecting,” Dr Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. “Complying with this law can mean the difference between life and death for pregnant people, forcing providers like me to choose between caring for someone in their time of need and turning my back on them to comply with cruel and dangerous laws.”Last year, the US supreme court heard arguments in a case involving Idaho’s abortion ban, which at the time only allowed abortions in cases where a woman’s life was at risk. In contrast, most state abortion bans permit abortions when a patient’s “health” is in danger – a lower standard that could make it easier for doctors to intervene. Idaho’s standard, the Biden administration said, blocked doctors from providing abortions in some emergencies and thus violated Emtala’s requirement that hospitals must stabilize patients.Ultimately, the supreme court punted on the issue by ruling 6-3 on procedural grounds that the case had been “improvidently granted”, indicating they should have never taken it up in the first place.“This court had a chance to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation and we have squandered it,” wrote Ketanji Brown Jackson, the supreme court justice, at the time. “And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas and elsewhere will be paying the price.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s Tuesday move is not unexpected. In March, the administration moved to drop out of the case over the Idaho abortion ban. A local Idaho hospital later filed its own lawsuit over the ban. More

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      Étienne-Émile Baulieu, Father of the Abortion Pill, Is Dead at 98

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      Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the French biochemist and physician who was often called the father of the abortion pill — and who was also known for his pioneering studies on the role of steroid hormones in human reproduction and aging — died on Friday at his home in Paris. He was 98.His wife, Simone Harari Baulieu, confirmed the death on social media.Dr. Baulieu’s early research focused on hormones, notably DHEA, one of the key hormones in the adrenal gland, as well as groundbreaking work on estrogen and progesterone. But it was his development in the early 1980s of the synthetic steroid RU-486, or mifepristone, that thrust him onto the public stage.Unlike the morning-after pill, which is used after sex to delay ovulation, RU-486 works as a kind of “anti-hormone,” in Dr. Baulieu’s words, by blocking the uterus from receiving progesterone, thereby preventing a fertilized egg from implanting.Taking the drug with misoprostol, a drug that causes uterine contractions, essentially triggers a miscarriage, enabling women to terminate early pregnancies without surgery.The two-dose treatment has been proved safe and highly effective — with a success rate of about 95 percent — and is commonly used in many countries; in the United States, medication abortions accounted for more than 50 percent of all abortions in 2020. After the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, demand for the pills surged, and abortion opponents began seeking ways to ban the drug nationwide.Controversy over RU-486 began as soon as its release in the 1980s. Dr. Baulieu developed the drug in partnership with the French drug company Roussel-Uclaf, where he was an independent consultant.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      FBI to reinvestigate 2023 White House cocaine find and leak of supreme court Dobbs draft

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      The FBI will launch new investigations into the 2023 discovery of a bag of cocaine at the White House during Joe Biden’s term, as well as into pipe bombs discovered at Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot by supporters of Donald Trump, and the leak of the supreme court’s draft opinion before the historic overturning of national abortion rights with the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.Dan Bongino, a rightwing podcaster turned deputy director of the FBI, made the announcement on X, where he said he had requested weekly briefings on any progress in looking into the old cases. The incidents have been popular talking points on America’s political right wing and among conspiracy theorists.Bongino said that he and the FBI director, Kash Patel, had been evaluating “a number of cases of potential public corruption that, understandably, have garnered public interest” and had made a decision “to either re-open, or push additional resources and investigative attention, to these cases”.The FBI deputy director made an appeal for “investigative tips on these matters”.The discovery of a small, zippered bag of cocaine in a cubby near the entrance to the West Wing two years ago drew excited commentary from Republicans, including then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has said it was implausible the drugs could belong to anyone beyond Joe Biden or son Hunter Biden – even though the Biden family was away from Washington at the time.Bongino has previously alleged, without presenting any evidence, that he was in touch with whistleblowers who told him they were “suspicious” that evidence from the White House cocaine bag “could match a member of the inner Biden circle”.A formal laboratory test confirmed that the powder found was indeed cocaine and the Secret Service said the substance was found in a “highly trafficked” area of the White House and it was reviewing visitor logs to determine how it had gotten there.Then White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that public tours of the West Wing had taken place over the weekend when the discovery was made, prompting an evacuation of the executive mansion.“We have confidence that they will get to the bottom of this,” Jean-Pierre later said, referring to the Secret Service. A White House spokesperson said that the allegations that Hunter Biden was involved was “incredibly irresponsible”.But in his first interview as a president in February this year, Trump returned to the subject, arguing that forensic analysis should have revealed fingerprints but the evidence appeared to have been deliberately wiped clean. He described the cocaine discovery as a “terrible thing”.The pre-emptive publication of the supreme court’s opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion in Politico on 2 May 2022 provoked condemnation from Trump, who called the source of the leak “slime” and demanded that the journalists involved be imprisoned until they revealed who it was.Eight months later, the supreme court released a 23-page report into the leak saying the investigative team “has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence”.Investigations into both cases ended without identifying who was responsible for the cocaine or the leak.Bongino also announced more resources for the FBI’s investigation into the placement of pipe bombs at the Democratic national committee and the Republican national committee in Washington.The bombs, which were later defused, had been planted the night before Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.

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      Right now in an Atlanta hospital room lies a 30-year-old nurse and mother, Adriana Smith. Ms. Smith, who is brain-dead, has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days. Ms. Smith is pregnant.“We didn’t have a choice or a say about it,” Ms. Smith’s mother told a local news outlet. “We want the baby. That’s a part of my daughter. But the decision should have been left to us — not the state.”After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Georgia banned almost all abortions in cases where a fetus has a “detectable human heartbeat.” Legislators did not seem to have considered a situation in which a pregnant woman is legally dead. In this case there is much we do not know: What exactly did the hospital tell Ms. Smith’s family? What did they feel they could do in the case where a fetus continued to grow in the body of a woman who was brain-dead? Would they have counseled this family differently about their options before the fall of Roe?Reproductive justice advocates have long been clear that abortion law is never only about abortion. It is about the exercise of control over all pregnant women, regardless of whether they plan to carry their pregnancies to term. That’s why the anti-abortion movement has pursued a broad agenda of legal personhood for embryos and fetuses. Though not all who cheered the fall of Roe might have understood the full ramifications of the decision, this kind of catastrophic event was inevitable, given the expansive and imprecise laws written by legislators who generally lack medical expertise, and the inability of politicians to fully predict every emergency situation.The few facts of the case, as far as the public knows, are this: Ms. Smith was about nine weeks pregnant when she sought medical assistance for severe headaches, her mother told local news. She was sent home with medication. The next morning Ms. Smith was in distress and was rushed to the hospital. A CT scan discovered multiple blood clots in her brain. She was declared brain-dead, but her fetus’s heart continued to beat.When faced with the deleterious effect of restrictive abortion laws on women, legislators and anti-abortion advocates have often blamed doctors or lawyers for misinterpreting those laws. Already, Georgia officials are divided over whether Ms. Smith’s barbarous condition is insisted upon by the law.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Missouri Lawmakers to Put Abortion on Ballot Again, Seeking Another Ban

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      The state’s Republicans are putting abortion on a ballot question again, seeking to buck the trend of voters siding with abortion rights on ballot measures.In November, Missouri became the first state to overturn a near-total abortion ban by a citizen-sponsored ballot measure. On Wednesday, it became the first state to try to reverse that decision through a ballot question, after the Republican-controlled legislature approved a measure that would ask voters to ban abortion again.The question will appear on the ballot in November 2026, although Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican who opposes abortion rights, could choose to put the issue before voters in a special election before that.The measure would amend the state Constitution to ban abortion except in medical emergencies, or in cases of rape or incest if the assault was reported to police within 48 hours and the pregnancy is less than 12 weeks along. The measure would also ban gender-affirming surgery or medications for minors.The legislature approved the measure on the penultimate day of its session after fierce opposition from Democrats and infighting among Republicans, some of whom argued that the new amendment should not include exceptions for rape and incest.The move bucks the trend on abortion-related ballot measures. Voters have sided with abortion rights in 14 out of 17 times that the question has appeared on state ballots in the three years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had for five decades recognized a right to abortion in the Constitution. Opponents of abortion rights have grown wary of putting the question before voters, and in states such as Florida and Arkansas, are instead trying to make it harder for citizens to put questions on the ballot, or pass ballot measures.But Republicans who control the levers of state government in Missouri have long been fiercely anti-abortion; it was the first state to officially ban abortion after the court overturned Roe. They are hoping it will not take much to reverse the amendment approved in November, which passed with support from just under 52 percent of the vote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Conservatives are trumpeting a new abortion-pill study. One problem: it’s bogus | Moira Donegan

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      Almost two-thirds of US abortions are induced with pills. The drug mifepristone blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, ending the growth of the fetus. Mifepristone was designed for abortions: its primary purpose, from its development through its regulatory approval and now on the market, has always been to allow women to control their own bodies and lives by ending their pregnancies. Because it exists as a tool of women’s independence, mifepristone has been the object of controversy, misinformation and intense scrutiny for the entirety of its existence. Originally synthesized by French pharmaceutical researchers in 1980, the drug went through a rigorous, prolonged and heavily politicized approval process in the US, and wasn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the US market until 2000.The anti-abortion movement – including several prominent Republican lawmakers – is looking to undo that. Since the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that eliminated the nationwide right to abortion, women living in anti-choice states have relied increasingly on mifepristone, particularly pills shipped by mail from providers in pro-choice states who prescribe the drug via telehealth. It is estimated that as many as 20% of abortions in the US are now accessed via telehealth appointments, a technological marvel that has allowed many people living in anti-choice states to avert the worst consequences to their lives, health and dignity that were threatened by the Dobbs decision by circumventing the unjust abortion bans that their states have attempted to impose on them. Dobbs has already been devastating for American women, causing needless deaths, driving up maternal mortality, derailing women’s lives, constraining their prospects, and injuring their standing as equal citizens. The post-2022 explosion of telehealth abortion using mifepristone is the reason why the consequences have not been even worse.Now, Trump’s new FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, is under pressure to restrict access to the drug. Pressed by reporters at the Semafor World Economy Summit late last month, Makaray said that he had “no plans” to review the status of mifepristone. But he added a crucial caveat: that he would reconsider the drug’s accessibility if new information emerged about the drug’s safety. “If the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise that we’re not going to act on that data,” he said.As if on cue, a conservative thinktank published a new study just days later that purported to find that mifepristone caused serious adverse effects in more than 10% of patients. The study – which contradicts all previous tests of the drug and the resounding consensus of the medical field – was published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing advocacy group that aims to “apply the richness of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law” and “push back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives”.The study was rapidly amplified on conservative social media, and was pushed by several Republican senators who had previously called on Makaray to ban mifepristone at his March confirmation hearing. Missouri’s Josh Hawley, the author of a book on “manhood” who once raised a fist in solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, declared in a statement directed at Makaray: “Well, the new data is here. And it’s a signal that can’t be missed: Mifepristone is not safe.” Hawley went on to urge the FDA to restrict access to the drug and revert to pre-pandemic regulations, in which mifepristone could only be dispensed by a doctor after multiple in-person visits: a regulatory regime that would cut off abortion access to millions of women in anti-choice states.But the study that is being proposed as a pretext for restricting abortion access has come under scrutiny from doctors and statisticians for its questionable methodology. Drawing from insurance claim data from 2017 to 2023, the EPPC study claims that 10% of women who take mifepristone experience “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, an emergency room visit, or another serious adverse event within 45 days”. This would be alarming if it were true, but it isn’t.Instead, the study seems to have been designed to dramatically overstate the side-effects of mifepristone, in part by counting the normal and intended functioning of the drug – such as vaginal bleeding as the pregnancy terminates and post-medication doctor visits to confirm the completion of the miscarriage – as serious adverse effects. The study also claimed that a vast range of health experiences in the 45 days following the medication – such as mental health symptoms – were caused by the drug, a claim that the data does not support. The EPPC study also seems to include those who were prescribed mifepristone for non-abortion uses, such as miscarriage management, as well as those who took it alone, without the standard misoprostol dose that accompanies it. The study is not peer-reviewed and has not been published in a medical journal, because its authors could not meet the standards that such publication requires: their work is not up to snuff. Dr Stella Dantas, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, called the paper “seriously flawed” and said that it “manipulates data to drive a myth that medication abortion isn’t safe”.The truth is that abortion pills have a lower rate of serious complications than Tylenol, and that the anti-abortion movement is in fact a great danger to American women’s health. It is because of abortion bans – not abortion access – that women in America are facing dramatically rising rates of “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging” and death in pregnancy. In Texas alone, the rate of sepsis in pregnant women experiencing second-trimester miscarriages increased by more than 50% in the years since the state’s near-total abortion ban went into effect, and experts say that the laws prohibiting abortion are the cause. The adverse effects that the anti-abortion movement sees in mifepristone’s availability is not a matter of women’s health, which they are indifferent to. It is women’s freedom.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More