Recently, on June 13, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its first abortion-related decision after the Dobbs case. The decision in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was in some ways a disappointment, but in other ways a big advantage in the long run, for the anti-abortion side.
The disappointment, of course, is that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the doctors of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine did not have standing to bring this case in the first place, because they were not being harmed by the actions they were protesting.
This in itself has a silver lining, though.
To explain:
But the immediate and tragic result of this decision is that chemical abortion — a barbaric way of starving babies and then flushing them down the toilet — continues with practically no safety measures regulating it.
The safety measures for the mother initially put in place when the chemical abortion drugs were approved under the Clinton administration were stripped away step by step under the Obama administration and now under the Biden administration.
The Democratic Party is indeed the party of death.
The need for in-person doctors’ visits was removed.
The length of time into the pregnancy when these drugs can be used was increased.
Reporting requirements were weakened.
And the ability to prescribe the drugs involved was no longer limited to doctors.
All the carnage now continues unchecked, while the FDA’s own label says that roughly one in 25 women who take chemical abortion drugs will end up in the emergency room.
The Supreme Court, in yesterday’s decision, did not reach the question as to whether the FDA acted appropriately in stripping these safety regulations.
Were their decisions based on science and medicine, or on politics and pressure?
That question still needs to be answered, for the sake of the lives of babies and the health of women. The Democratic politicians screaming about "women’s health" might want to echo this question, if their loyalty is actually to women’s health and not to the abortion industry.
But the decision yesterday contains a lot of good for our movement which we must not miss.
First of all, the question of standing, and the overall role of the courts, have been consistently abused by the abortion industry.
Activist judges and the Democratic Party see the court as a political body to engineer social change, and in the June 13 decision — as in the Dobbs decision — the Court resists that role.
To quote the decision: "The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone.
"But …, the federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions.
"The plaintiffs may present their concerns and objections to the President and FDA in the regulatory process, or to Congress and the President in the legislative process.
"And they may also express their views about abortion and mifepristone to fellow citizens, including in the political and electoral processes."
This very much reflects the Court’s stance in Dobbs, where it said that abortion policy should be worked out by the people and their elected representatives, fueled by a robust public debate that is not short-circuited by the unhistorical assertion that there’s a "Constitutional right to abortion."
Incidentally, this also gives us insight into why abortion advocates are now pushing to have a "right to abortion" imposed on state constitutions, although this has never been done before in American history.
They want to bypass the more robust debate that should occur in legislatures and between American citizens.
The concurring opinion of Justice Thomas in the June 13 decision reminds us that the determination that the anti-abortion doctors didn’t have standing cuts both ways.
Third-party standing, by which somebody goes to court to plead for the rights of somebody else, is normally subject to strict limitations and conditions except in the area of abortion.
The Dobbs decision, in fact, pointed to this as one of the lamentable consequences of Roe, which harmed our judicial system in multiple ways.
In many court cases, abortion providers have claimed to be able to speak on behalf of their clients' "right" to an abortion, and have gotten away with it.
But as Justice Thomas writes in this case: "Our third-party standing doctrine is mistaken. …So, just as abortionists lack standing to assert the rights of their clients, doctors who oppose abortion cannot vicariously assert the rights of their patients."
Another important victory in yesterday’s decision is that even though it declared that the doctors in this case were not subject to a violation of their consciences, it reasserted that: "Federal conscience laws definitively protect doctors from being required to perform abortions or to provide other treatment that violates their consciences.
"Federal law protects doctors from repercussions when they have 'refused' to participate in an abortion."
In this case, the government was initially taking the position that the doctors did not have such conscience protection. But at the high court the FDA changed its position and admitted that doctors do have such protections.
Let’s build on these important aspects of this decision as we continue to use the many mechanisms, well beyond the Supreme Court, that we possess to advance the protection of the unborn and their mothers.
Frank Pavone is an anti-abortion leader, and National Director of Priests for Life. Read Frank Pavone Reports — More Here.