* Press release…

Following a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that the plaintiffs in the court’s landmark mifepristone access case lack standing, Illinois Governor and Think Big America Founder JB Pritzker released the following statement:

“Today’s ruling is a small victory in our fight to protect reproductive rights. It means that mifepristone, a safe and widely used medication, will remain available for the millions of women who need it. But we know that unless we remain vigilant, this ruling will only be a temporary roadblock to MAGA extremists waging war against women’s rights. To fully protect reproductive freedom, we must ensure MAGA extremists never again control the White House or Congress. Attacks on science and on Americans’ personal freedoms will only end if voters show up and fully defeat their agenda at every level of government.”

* NPR…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills. By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game.

The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.

The court’s action amounted to a legal off-ramp, leaving the FDA rules in place, without directly addressing the regulations themselves.

The court’s decision also avoided, at least for now, a challenge to the entire structure of the FDA’s regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety—a system that for decades has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation.

* The 19th…

More than 60 percent of U.S. abortions are now done with medication, which poses an existential threat to the anti-abortion movement’s goals, since it can be transported across state lines. The movement has responded by filing lawsuits challenging how mifepristone can be used and prescribed, including in the case Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide next month.

Republican lawmakers in GOP-led states have introduced — and in several cases enacted — legislation with the same intent. Their state attorneys general are also paying close attention to how mifepristone is prescribed and obtained and are searching for ways to discourage it.

* NYT…

More than 14,000 Texas patients crossed the border into New Mexico for an abortion last year. An additional 16,000 left Southern states bound for Illinois. And nearly 12,000 more traveled north from South Carolina and Georgia to North Carolina.

These were among the more than 171,000 patients who traveled for an abortion in 2023, new estimates show, demonstrating both the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the limits of state bans to stop the procedure. The data also highlights the unsettled nature of an issue that will test politicians up and down the ballot in November.

Out-of-state travel for abortions — either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions. On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a case that would have sharply curtailed access to medication abortion, allowing the pills to remain available to patients traveling from states with bans. […]

On the receiving end, nowhere saw more out-of-state patients — and from more states — than Illinois.