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Fiercely Anti-Abortion Judge Has Bowed Out of Blockbuster Mifepristone Case

But the threat isn’t over.

NINA MARTIN

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In a ruling by turns petulant, defiant, and resigned, a federal judge in Texas who has spent the past three years trying to help conservative groups overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone has bowed out of the case.

US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has transferred the case formerly known as FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine out of his Amarillo, Texas, court, where he is the sole federal judge, to a Missouri federal court packed with his fellow Trump appointees. The Missouri court will decide whether to allow the case to continue.

The move came Tuesday night, as a federal government shutdown loomed. In a 27-page decision, Kacsmaryk wrote that three states that had intervened in the case back in 2023—Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas—no longer had any business being in his court.

Kacsmaryk’s hand was more or less forced after the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 last year that the plaintiffs who first brought the Alliance lawsuit—a coalition of anti-abortion medical organizations and doctors opposed to mifepristone—didn’t have the right, or standing, to sue. The lawsuit argued that the FDA exceeded its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000, and then again during the Obama and Biden administrations, when the agency loosened key rules and greatly expanded access to abortion drugs. But the justices ruled that the medical groups could not show that the FDA regulations caused them or their members any direct harm.

The justices, however, left open the possibility that Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas—which intervened in the case in 2023—might have standing to sue the FDA on their own.

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