The New Yorker:

Even some conservative Justices seemed unpersuaded by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine’s claims.

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

There were times, during the oral arguments on Tuesday in the Supreme Court case about mifepristone, an abortion pill, when the Justices seemed struck by the shamelessness of what the litigants trying to limit access to the drug were demanding. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it, “I’m worried that there is a significant mismatch in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that is being sought.” The case, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, stems from the A.H.M.’s claim that some of its members are anti-abortion doctors who might someday suffer a “conscience injury” as the result of being asked to treat a patient who needed care after taking mifepristone. Such personal objections, the group says, give it what’s known as “standing” to go to court and demand that the F.D.A. rewrite its rules to limit access to mifepristone for everyone—even in states where abortion is legal.

As Jackson pointed out, “the obvious common-sense remedy” would be to provide any such doctors with an exemption—which, as it happens, they already have. Federal law allows doctors to decline to take part in an abortion at any stage. The A.H.M. wants “more than that,” Jackson said. “And I guess I’m just trying to understand how they could possibly be entitled to that.”

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