Senator Murray Responds to Supreme Court Agreeing to Hear Mifepristone Case After Leading 257 Members in Amicus Brief

Senator Murray has been leading the Congressional response to the dangerous mifepristone lawsuit; Murray led an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant cert, overturn the Fifth Circuit’s decision

Senator Murray: “It is essential that the Supreme Court overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling and definitively reject the plaintiffs’ outrageous, politically motivated efforts to drastically restrict access to necessary and lifesaving abortion care throughout the entire country.”

Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair and senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA case. At issue in the case is access to mifepristone, a safe and effective medication abortion drug that was approved by the FDA in 2000 and is used in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.

In October, following the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision to restrict access to mifepristone, Senator Murray led 257 Members of Congress in filing an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant certiorari (meaning to hear the case) in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA and outlining why the Fifth Circuit’s decision was dangerously wrong.

“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court to hear this case means they will have the opportunity to reject the unprecedented, dangerous, and illegitimate arguments made by the plaintiffs in this case. I’ve been clear all along that this case has nothing to do with the safety or efficacy of FDA-approved mifepristone—which is not up for debate—but about Republicans’ anti-women, anti-science, and anti-abortion agenda which they continue to force on the American people despite repeated and overwhelming rejection at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.

“Beyond the truly devastating harm this case would do to women’s access to essential health care—at a time where medication abortion accounts for more than half of abortions in the U.S.—the implications for other FDA-approved medications that Americans rely on are enormous. It is essential that the Supreme Court overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling and definitively reject the plaintiffs’ outrageous, politically motivated efforts to drastically restrict access to necessary and lifesaving abortion care throughout the entire country.”

Senator Murray has been leading the response to this dangerous lawsuit in Congress from the beginning. Following Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA in the federal district court in Texas, Murray emphatically denounced the ruling in a press call the very next morning with Leader Schumer, helped lead her colleagues in filing an amicus brief before the Fifth Circuit urging a stay of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, underscored how harmful the Fifth Circuit’s ruling overriding FDA’s experts and imposing outdated restrictions on the drug, and helped lead her colleagues in filing an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to stay the lower court ruling, which the Court did in April—allowing mifepristone to remain on the market under its existing FDA approval while the merits of the case are under review. Murray responded forcefully to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling imposing restrictions on access to mifepristone and led 257 members—50 Senators and 207 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives—in filing an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in the case and arguing that FDA’s current approach to regulating mifepristone must be upheld.  

Senator Murray has been repeatedly warning about the tremendous harm this lawsuit could inflict on women and patients in all 50 states and has been leading the fight in Congress to protect Americans’ ability to get medication abortion. She pushed to expand access to mifepristone as COVID-19 first spread across the U.S. and blocked Republicans’ attempts to curb access to it in the middle of the pandemic. Senator Murray applauded FDA’s removal of burdensome barriers to mifepristone and has long underscored that access to medications like mifepristone, which has a strong track record of safety and effectiveness, should be based on science—not politics.

Senator Murray has always fought to make reproductive health care more accessible and affordable for women everywhere–beating back countless Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and other family planning services over the course of her career, and she is widely credited with successfully pushing the Bush administration to follow the science and make Plan B available over the counter.

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