The measure remains in effect until the conservative majority Supreme Court decides whether or not to take up the case. The nine judges had until Thursday to rule on the legal challenge filed by the laboratories Danco and GenBioPro, manufacturers of mifepristone, a medication used in medication abortions that accounted for more than two-thirds of abortions in the United States in 2023. At least two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, have expressed their disagreement with the decision made.
“We are not celebrating yet” – says Kelly Baden, Vice President of the Guttmacher Institute, a leading organization on the subject. Danco, in its emergency request to the Supreme Court, warned of “immediate confusion” and “sudden upheaval for manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, pharmacies, and patients nationwide” resulting from a block on prescription telemedicine and postal delivery, affecting “highly sensitive medical decisions.”
Requiring women to have an in-person medical appointment would further restrict access to abortion in a country where, since 2022 and a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the right to abortion is no longer guaranteed federally and is now in the hands of each state. About twenty states have since either banned, with very few exceptions, or restricted access to abortion to an extreme degree, whether by medication or surgery. What remained was a gap: obtaining the abortion pill by prescription in a state with protective abortion laws and having it delivered by mail. In the United States, more than one in four people who had a medically supervised abortion in 2025 did so through telemedicine prescription, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
“No peace of mind” – sums up Nancy Northup, head of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Today’s decision buys us time but does not bring us peace of mind,” she says. Access to mifepristone remains “greatly threatened” by this judicial process and also by the Trump administration, which initiated a “politically motivated review” of the pill, with the aim of making it harder to obtain. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun a safety review of mifepristone under pressure from the anti-abortion camp since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
