09.08.26 – The Center for Reproductive Rights is launching a new Medication Abortion Defense Portal to ensure advocates, policymakers, and partners have timely legal analysis and policy resources in response to the growing number of efforts to restrict access to medication abortion.

“As anti-abortion extremists escalate their attacks on medication abortion, the Center’s Portal provides policymakers and advocates with tools to fight back against targeted efforts to ban medication abortion,” said Daria Neal, Senior Director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “As the legal and policy landscape continues to shift, advocates, partners, and policymakers need timely, accurate information to understand the threats to medication abortion and respond effectively in their communities. This portal will equip advocates to fight back against the unprecedented range of litigation, legislative, and regulatory threats to medication abortion is facing at both the federal and state levels.”

Medication abortion faces attacks from all sides. Litigation from hostile states seeks to restrict access nationwide: Louisiana v. FDA, a case currently pending before the Fifth Circuit, challenges the FDA’s decisions allowing mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used for medication abortion, to be dispensed through pharmacies or by mail. Cases brought by Texas and Missouri seek to impose even greater restrictions on mifepristone, including potentially requiring the FDA to withdraw its approval of the medication altogether. Beyond the courts, the federal government could further restrict access: President Trump’s anti-abortion appointees are driving a medically unnecessary “study” of mifepristone’s safety that could lay the groundwork to potentially impose new, medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, while others are poised to potentially enforce the Comstock Act, an obscure 1873 law that extremists are pressing the Trump administration to weaponize into a de facto nationwide abortion ban. And at the state level, anti-abortion lawmakers in states like Texas and South Carolina are pursuing their own efforts to restrict medication abortion.

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You can find the Medication Abortion Defense Portal at https://reproductiverights.org/issues/abortion/medication-abortion-defense-portal.

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