The Supreme Court on Tuesday renewed a requirement for women to obtain abortion pills at medical facilities, following a request from the Trump administration.
In a 6-3 decision split along conservative versus liberal bloc lines, the court decided that a July ordinance allowing women to receive the pills in the mail, per the coronavirus pandemic, is no longer in effect. The Trump administration asked for the requirement to be reinstated late last year.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a concurrence with the unsigned majority opinion that the “courts owe significant deference to the politically accountable entities with the ‘background, competence, and expertise to assess public health,'” referring to a Food and Drug Administration rule requiring women to pick up abortion pills in person.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan, decried the decision as “unnecessary, unjustifiable, irrational, and undue burden on women seeking an abortion during the current pandemic.”
“Under these conditions, the in-person requirements for mifepristone impose an unjustifiable and undue burden on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion,” Sotomayor wrote in reference to the pill that many women will now be required to pick up in person.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that he would have denied the Trump administration’s application.
The decision comes after an October ruling by the court in which it allowed women to continue receiving the abortion drug by mail without weighing the merits of the case. That decision was the court’s first abortion-related decision after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
