The Justice Department is asking a federal court to pause Louisiana’s lawsuit that challenges the deregulation of abortion pills, noting that the FDA is already conducting a review.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking to pause a lawsuit filed by the state of Louisiana that challenges the federal policy of allowing mail-order abortion pills, which has prompted strong criticism from the state’s attorney general and pro-life advocates.
“[This] is an affront to our sovereignty and the dignity of women and the unborn,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a post on X one day after the DOJ filed a motion with a federal district court to pause the lawsuit.
Murrill filed a lawsuit in late 2025 to challenge the 2023 deregulation of mifepristone, which is used in chemical abortions. The 2023 rule changes, initiated during former President Joe Biden’s administration, allowed the drugs to be delivered through the mail and prescribed without any visits to a doctor.
The state filed the lawsuit after residents — including Rosalie Markezich, who is named in the lawsuit — said they were coerced into taking abortion pills that were obtained through the mail. In Markezich’s case, she said her boyfriend forced her to take it.
Louisiana prohibits most surgical and chemical abortions beginning at the point of conception, and some residents have received the drugs from out-of-state suppliers. Some states, including New York and California, adopted laws to prohibit their state courts from complying with court orders from states that try to bring charges or civil action against those suppliers.
Murrill, a Republican, said in her post that Trump’s Food and Drug Administration “should stand with us for life” and not with California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats.
The DOJ justified its request by noting that the FDA is conducting a review of the 2023 rule changes. The FDA started its review in September 2025 and in that same month approved a generic form of mifepristone, which offered cheaper access to chemical abortion, without changing the regulations that concerned pro-life advocates.
In the court filing, the DOJ argued that Louisiana’s lawsuit, which asks the court to immediately halt the mail delivery of abortion drugs, “threaten[s] to short circuit the agency’s orderly review and study of the safety risks of mifepristone.”
Although the 2023 rules remain intact, the DOJ noted the FDA is “already reconsidering the matter in its review” and Louisiana’s request “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive” if the FDA decides to end the mail delivery of abortion drugs following its review.
Even though the DOJ is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, the court filing acknowledges concerns about the safety of the abortion pill and notes that the official review is “informed by the lack of adequate consideration” underlying previous FDA risk assessments of the drug.
Murrill noted in her post on X that the FDA admits the prior risk assessments were flawed “but claims that Louisiana can’t sue to stop the 1,000 dangerous abortions a month in Louisiana.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, criticized the administration in a statement, saying the “denial of justice by the DOJ is completely unacceptable.”
“It slams the door on women like Rosalie Markezich and their babies, who are suffering very real harm as the Trump-Vance administration refuses to reimplement basic guardrails on deadly mail-order abortion drugs,” Dannenfelser said.
“Nearly a year ago, Secretary [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] promised a comprehensive study of the real-world harms of abortion drugs, yet the FDA has slow-walked it out of political fear,” she said.
“Now we are told it will be at least 2027 — well after midterms,” she said. “That is unacceptable. But this study also should not substitute for plain common sense: Deadly abortion drugs do not belong in the mail with no in-person doctor visit, no ultrasound, no meaningful medical oversight, and no accountability.”
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, said at a minimum doctors “have a duty to provide careful medical supervision and oversight to patients who seek to obtain dangerous pharmaceuticals.”
“This oversight calls for significant patient scrutiny, medical testing, interviews, and in-person exams to assure that any prescribed medications will be appropriate for the specific medical situation of the patient,” he said. “Such attentive oversight gets thrown to the wind when lawmakers and others allow mothers to have mail-order access to pharmaceuticals to induce elective abortions.”
Pacholczyk said “abortion and the direct taking of innocent life has become a kind of sacred cow” in society.
“Politicians, the media, and many in the medical profession and the judiciary who promote mail-order availability of abortion pills across state jurisdictional lines have decided that abortion deserves an entirely different and lower standard than the rest of medicine,” he said.
Although most of the Biden-era abortion pill policies remain in place, the administration made one move this week to rescind guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services, which officials believed could have been interpreted to force pharmacies to fill prescriptions for abortion pills.
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