After reading and hearing all the stories about how shocking it was for the conservative Supreme Court justices “sided” with the liberal side in the abortion drug case, it’s no surprise why all the justices were on the same side with this case: It was about standing, or the legal ability to even hear the case at all.
This is where the abortion pill case, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, diverges from the right-to-abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. They posed completely different questions before the Court.
Dobbs was about the constitutional right to abortion, whereas Alliance was a procedural. It was only a coincidence that they both dealt with the abortion issue. Nothing more.
It’s also not shocking to me that even the most hardcore justices against abortion and women’s rights in general (the thom-alito twins, as I call those two) agreed to torpedo the Alliance case. The High Court does whatever it can to dispose of a case with the least effort. This is common in every federal court.
So, looking beyond the talking points and the drama the media has created over the abortion pill case, it’s really not what they make it appear. It’s a simple procedural case that simply couldn’t be decided by any court.
And that’s another thing. The Court didn’t decide the merits of the case. All the Supreme Court did was decide whether the case could be heard by a court. It couldn’t and that was the end of it.
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