Washington — The Trump administration on Monday urged a federal district court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s actions expanding access to the widely used abortion pill mifepristone.
Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing with the U.S. district court in Amarillo, Texas, that the three states pursuing the lawsuit — Missouri, Idaho and Kansas — should not be able to do so in that court. The administration is pursuing a request initially made by the Biden administration last year in the closely watched challenge to mifepristone, a drug used to terminate an early pregnancy, that has been playing out before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
“At bottom, the states cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the states’ own claims have no connection to this district,” Trump administration lawyers wrote. “The states are free to pursue their claims in a district where venue is proper, but the states’ claims before this court must be dismissed or transferred pursuant to the venue statute’s mandatory command.”
The legal battle over mifepristone was initially filed by a group of anti-abortion rights doctors and medical associations in November 2022. The coalition sought to roll back a series of changes made by the FDA that relaxed the rules for the drug’s use. But the Supreme Court last year rejected that challenge and unanimously ruled that the plaintiffs did not have the legal right to sue, a concept known as legal standing.
But attorneys general for Missouri, Idaho and Kansas, who had intervened at an earlier stage in the litigation, sought to continue the lawsuit. They argued that changes made by the FDA beginning in 2016 were unlawful. Among those efforts were allowing mifepristone to be taken up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy, rather than seven weeks, expanding the health care providers who can prescribe the drug and allowing the medication to be dispensed through the mail.
The Justice Department said in its filing to Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Trump during his first term, that the states’ claims “have no connection” to the Northern District of Texas, where the case was filed, and that even if they were to file their own lawsuit there, it could not move forward because it is not the proper venue.
“Regardless of the merits of the states’ claims, the states cannot proceed in this court,” administration lawyers said. “The states’ amended complaint should be dismissed or transferred for lack of venue.”
The Justice Department also said the states do not have the legal standing to sue and waited too long to challenge the FDA’s 2016 actions, which are subject to a six-year statute of limitations. The FDA first approved mifepristone in 2000 and has issued a series of changes in the years since that have made the drug more widely available.
Medication abortions made up more than half of all abortions in the United States health care system in 2023, according to a study from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research group. Twenty-eight states restrict access to mifepristone, according to the organization, four of which prohibit the mailing of abortion pills to patients.
The filing from the Trump administration is the first in which it has expressed a position on the challenge involving mifepristone. After Mr. Trump won a second term in office, conservatives urged his administration to force the FDA to roll back its earlier moves that made mifepristone easier to obtain.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told senators during his confirmation hearing earlier this year that Mr. Trump had asked him to study the safety of mifepristone. Kennedy, whose agency oversees the FDA, said that while the president had not taken a stand on how to regulate the abortion pill, he would implement the president’s policies.
The president said in June 2024 that he had “strong views” on mifepristone and pledged to release a policy position on access to the drug, but did not do so.
