NEW: Supreme Court unanimously strikes down lawsuit challenging FDA approval of abortion pill

In a unanimous decision delivered on Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a lawsuit challenging the abortion pill mifepristone.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion for the court, with Justice Clarence Thomas delivering the concurring opinion. The court stated that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine did not have standing to bring forth the challenge over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication and the agency’s actions to ease access to the drug.

Kavanaugh wrote that "federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions."

"Plaintiffs are pro-life, oppose elective abortion, and have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to mifepristone being prescribed and used by others," Kavanaugh wrote in the ruling. "Because plaintiffs do not prescribe or use mifepristone, plaintiffs are unregulated parties who seek to challenge FDA’s regulation of others."

"Plaintiffs advance several complicated causation theories to connect FDA’s actions to the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries in fact. None of these theories suffices to establish Article III standing," he concluded.

"Plaintiffs first contend that FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone may cause downstream conscience injuries to the individual doctors," Kavanaugh wrote, adding that "the plaintiff doctors have not shown that they could be forced to participate in an abortion or provide abortion-related medical treatment over their conscience objections."

"Plaintiffs next assert they have standing because FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone may cause downstream economic injuries to the doctors," he continued, stating that "the causal link between FDA’s regulatory actions in 2016 and 2021 and those alleged injuries is too speculative, lacks support in the record, and is otherwise too attenuated to establish standing."

Kavanaugh said that "the plaintiff associations" cannot "establish standing simply because they object to FDA’s actions."

"The medical associations claim to have standing based on their incurring costs to oppose FDA’s actions. They say that FDA has “caused” the associations to conduct their own studies on mifepristone so that the associations can better inform their members and the public about mifepristone’s risks," he wrote, adding that "an organization that has not suffered a concrete injury caused by a defendant’s action cannot spend its way into standing simply by expending money to gather information and advocate against the defendant’s action."

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