Supreme Court Mifepristone Oral Arguments: Live Updates On Abortion Pill Hearing

We are concluding our live coverage of Tuesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Please check HuffPost.com for further updates on the case.

While SCOTUS heard oral arguments today, Democratic Reps. Dan Goldman (N.Y.) and Jasmine Crockett (Texas) introduced the "Abortion Care Awareness Act," which aims to increase accurate information about abortion services.

The flood of anti-abortion disinformation shared by crisis pregnancy centers poses a direct danger to women seeking reproductive health care across the country, Goldman said in a release.

"We must help women and families seeking access to life-saving reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, and help ensure they receive accurate information and resources to make informed medical decisions," Crockett said in a statement. "Fear and confusion are the most powerful tools used by forced birth extremists."

The court has finished hearing arguments. The hearing ended with a rebuttal from Prelogar, who said that the plaintiffs failed to prove any harm from the FDAs updated mifepristone rules or prove they have the standing to sue the FDA.

Erin Hawley, of the anti-abortion Alliance Defending Freedom, just argued that restricting mifepristone is justified not only to avoid the narrow harm of anti-abortion doctors participating in abortions the result of extremely rare emergency room visits by patients who took the pill but also a broader concern with being complicit in that process.

That complicity, which Hawley explained under questioning from Justices Kagan and Jackson, includes removing an embryo or fetus whether or not theyre alive as well as placental tissue Hawley said. She separately described it as completing ... an elective abortion.

Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Alliance for Defending Freedoms senior counsel Erin Hawley why this lawsuit the standing of which justices have repeatedly questioned should have such national implications.

This case seems like a prime example of turning a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule or any other federal government action, Gorsuch said.

Justice Elena Kagan sounded very dubious when asking plaintiffs attorney Erin Hawley to explain why her clients have standing to bring their case, saying the case sounded very probabilistic to me. Courts generally do not allow lawsuits to be brought unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that they were harmed by the entity they are suing they typically do not allow pure hypotheticals.

You need a person. You need a person to come in and meet the courts regular standing requirements. So whos your person? I know you have seven of them, Kagan asked, referring to the anti-abortion physicians who joined the case. Hawley named two of them, including Dr. Christina Francis, who said her colleague had to perform a dilation and curettage, or D&C, abortion procedure that Francis objected to personally.

Kagan said that usually doctors make their personal objections known beforehand.

"That may be harder, they may be easier in a particular context, but most hospitals have mechanisms in place, have routines in place," Kagan said.

Jackson asked Hawley to relay a specific instance of doctors wanting to object to the use of mifepristone but being unable to. Hawley says she cant, seemingly claiming that the doctors who want to object cant because emergency medicine is complicated.

Respondent doctors dont necessarily know until they scrub into that operating room whether this may or may not be abortion drug harm, she said. It could be a miscarriage, it could be an ectopic pregnancy, or it could be an elective abortion, your honor.

(Note: There is no way to medically distinguish between an elective abortion and a miscarriage, unless doctors run tests looking for mifepristone or misoprostol in the system.)

Jessica Ellsworth, who represents the drugmaker behind mifepristone, Danco, just called out District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who last year not only cited studies on mifepristone that were later retracted, but also cited a study based on years-old anonymous blog posts about the personal experiences of random people with abortion.

You have a district court that among other things relied on one study that was an analysis of anonymous blog posts. You have another set of studies that he relied on that were not in the administrative record and would never be, because they post-date the FDA decisions here. They have since been retracted for lack of scientific rigor, and for misleading presentations of data. Those sorts of errors can infect judicial analyses precisely because judges are not experts in statistics, they are not experts in the methodology used in scientific studies for clinical trials.

We discussed the retracted studies Ellsworth mentioned below. I also covered the anonymous blog post study that Kacsmaryk cited last year. In sum, random people anonymously responding to subway advertisements and billboards for the website AbortionChangesYou.com ending up cited in a court decision 13 years later. Read that coverage here.

Erin Hawley, the lawyer representing the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which brought the lawsuit, is now fielding questions. Hawley is married to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

Justice Samuel Alito suggested to Jessica Ellsworth, an attorney for Danco Laboratories, that her client was upset because the case had the potential to hurt its profits, saying that if the drugs availability is upheld, Youre going to make more money.

The injury is that we are prevented from selling our product in line with the FDAs scientific judgment abut the safe and efficacious use of the drug, Ellsworth said.

Do you think the FDA is infallible? Alito asked.

No, your honor. And we dont think that question is really teed up in any way in this case, Ellsworth responded.

Jessica Ellsworth, attorney for the makers of mifepristone, answered questions next. She took one from Thomas asking how advertising and mailing the medication does not violate the Comstock Act, a set of laws that criminalized the mailing of obscene materials, including items related to sexual health and contraception.

Ellsworth responded that the act hasnt been enforced in about 100 years.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson just called out what she said was a significant mismatch between the injury claimed by plaintiffs in this case doctors who object to abortion and their requested remedy, rolling back access to mifepristone for everyone. There is already law in place for doctors who have conscience objections to medical procedures like abortions, Justice Jackson noted.

Theyre saying, 'Because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, were seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all,' she said. I guess Im just trying to understand how they could possibly be entitled to that, given the injury that they have alleged.

Prelogar agreed, saying the relief that theyre seeking would dramatically alter the approved conditions of use for mifepristone and affect women all around the nation simply because of this conscience injury thats already directly addressed by other protections in federal law.

Justice Barrett is concerned about how the gestational age of a pregnancy is determined. Does providing mifepristone via mail (and therefore eliminating in-person visits), she wondered, lead to more mistakes in figuring out if a fetus is, say, 10 weeks old versus 7 weeks?

Prelogar counters that the premise of the question is wrong. Even with in-person visits going back to the drugs approval in 2000, she says, doctors have never required an ultrasound or anything similar to determine gestational age.