The U.S. Supreme Court was correct in freezing any limitations on the abortion medication mifepristone that a New Orleans federal appeals court panel had barred from being mailed and reduced by three weeks its availability to women seeking to terminate their pregnancies.
That unfair and unworkable appeals ruling came after an appeal of Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's wacko decision to undo the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drug dating back to the Clinton administration in 2000.
The same day that Kacsmaryk's decision--laced with his personal anti-abortion rhetoric--came out, federal Judge Thomas Rice in Spokane, Wash., issued his own order directing the FDA to keep mifepristone on the market unchanged. Clearly, the Big Nine in D.C. will have to make the final call.
So leaving everything in place for now, with a spare order from the high court of just three sentences, made sense. Except to Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who dissented from their seven colleagues. Silent Clarence wrote nothing, but Sam, author of the infamous Dobbs opinion from last summer overturning Roe v. Wade, penned three angry pages.
According to Dobbs, Alito wants states to allow or ban abortion, but removing the abortion pills by federal court action serves as a ban, so he's in a pickle now. Clearly upset, Alito fulminated against his court making a decision without a full hearing, the so-called "shadow docket," throwing back earlier criticisms of that maneuver by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor when they were on the losing side.
He wrote, "I did not agree with these criticisms at the time, but if they were warranted in the cases in which they were made, they are emphatically true here."
Alito also wrote that there would be no "irreparable harm" if the lower court's restrictions took place while the case is being fought out. Only an anti-abortion zealot would think that women needing abortions and being unable to get the required drugs through the mail or from their doctors is not "irreparable harm."