On September 16, 2026, CEVIHE opened the fall semester of its Politics and Culture from All Sides lunch series with a discussion of abortion pills and the Supreme Court. Professor Liana Woskie of Tufts University’s Department of Community Health guided students, faculty, and staff through a dispute that connects access to medical care with competing claims about state sovereignty, federal regulatory authority, and democratic legitimacy.
Participants read the Supreme Court’s May 14, 2026, order in Danco Laboratories, LLC v. Louisiana and GenBioPro, Inc. v. Louisiana, including dissents by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, alongside Amy Howe’s SCOTUSblog account. The texts posed a question with consequences beyond Louisiana: what should courts do when a state argues that a nationwide drug policy interferes with its abortion laws?
Professor Woskie began with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety program governing how mifepristone is prescribed and dispensed, known as a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS). Louisiana sought to suspend the FDA’s 2023 changes, which removed the requirement that patients obtain the drug in person. The state alleged that mail dispensing undermined its abortion restrictions and imposed investigative and Medicaid costs. Those claims raised distinct questions about whether Louisiana had standing to sue and whether it was entitled to temporary relief while litigation continued.
Manufacturers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro sought to preserve remote dispensing, citing disruption to their operations and potential financial losses. On May 1, the Fifth Circuit suspended the 2023 changes pending appeal; on May 14, the Supreme Court put that order on hold. The justices’ intervention allowed the federal dispensing rules to remain in effect without resolving the underlying dispute. By the September 16 session, the Fifth Circuit had heard oral argument on September 9.
The dissents made the reading especially useful for examining the relationship between procedure and principle. Justice Thomas argued that mailing mifepristone for use in abortions violated the Comstock Act. Justice Alito emphasized Louisiana’s authority to enforce its laws and concluded that the manufacturers had “failed to show that they face irreparable injury.” These were arguments against granting temporary relief, rather than holdings of the Court. The reading asked participants to consider how legal standards for injury shape access to a medication, even as larger constitutional and regulatory disagreements remain unsettled.
Before participants broke into small groups, Professor Woskie distinguished mifepristone from misoprostol, the second drug in the commonly used medication-abortion regimen. The litigation concerned mifepristone’s dispensing rules. She situated the case in the period after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and explained how telehealth and mail delivery complicated state efforts to restrict abortion. A rule about where medication can be obtained thus became a dispute over the practical reach of state law.
When the full group reconvened, students questioned what the abortion figures presented could establish. Did provider-reported counts capture medication obtained through informal channels? How should researchers compare in-state procedures with care supplied remotely? Professor Woskie connected these concerns to the difficulty of attributing changes in emergency care to a particular policy. Participants examined what evidence would distinguish costs caused by remote dispensing from costs associated with restrictions or other changes in healthcare access. The exchange highlighted how measurement and causation can affect a legal argument.
Professor Eitan Hersh also tested the relationship between moral commitments and legal standing. “If a state like Louisiana decides that life starts at conception and then wants to … represent the interests of the unborn … does that count as standing in court?” he asked. The question invited participants to distinguish a state’s asserted moral interest from the requirements for bringing a federal lawsuit.
Later, Professor Hersh turned to the politics of social movements. He asked whether, after decades of organizing to overturn Roe, the persistence of abortion access through mailed medication could be “so disruptive to the democratic process” for those who expected a different practical result. He offered the question for debate, asking, “Or do you not see it that way?” The issue was how to understand the relationship between winning a legal change and achieving a movement’s broader objectives.
Participants challenged that framing, distinguishing the goals of abortion opponents from what Dobbs had decided. They argued that giving states greater latitude also enabled states that protected abortion access to pursue their own policies. The discussion therefore tested competing accounts of state authority: does cross-state provision frustrate one state’s democratic choices, express another’s, or reveal a conflict that state-by-state regulation cannot settle on its own?
The conversation also considered the limits of enforcement, using Prohibition as an analogy rather than a prediction. Participants asked whether restrictions reduce demand or redirect it, and whether changes to federal drug policy could affect access beyond any one state. They also examined a question particularly significant for the litigation: should relief sought by Louisiana change dispensing rules for patients and providers nationwide?
The session brought legal interpretation, public health evidence, and moral disagreement into sustained conversation. It asked participants to separate their views on abortion from judgments about who should regulate it, what counts as injury, and what a court’s intervention can accomplish. That inquiry depended on the expectation Professor Hersh set at the outset: to “give each other the grace that we don’t always say things exactly the right way.”
This event recap was prepared by CEVIHE, with reporting support from Michael Onysko and photography by Cooper Kolehmainen.