Trump Asks Federal Court To Hit Pause On Abortion Pill Case, Citing Ongoing Study

The Trump administration on Tuesday asked a federal court to put on hold a lawsuit from Louisiana seeking sweeping national restrictions on abortion pills while the Food and Drug Administration reviews the safety of the drug and decides whether or not to roll back access.

The court filing stresses that the Trump administration is actively considering whether to keep current federal rules in place that allow access to the abortion pill mifepristone via telemedicine, mail delivery, and retail pharmacies. Allowing Louisiana’s lawsuit to move forward before that process is complete, the Justice Department argued, would “threaten to short circuit” sensitive regulatory and scientific work.

The Trump administration’s brief filed Tuesday also argues that Louisiana lacks standing, and disputes the state’s argument that the FDA’s policies around the pills have caused "sovereign harm” by enabling patients to obtain the drugs despite the state’s ban on all methods of abortion. The state should sue doctors that prescribe the pills across state lines, rather than the Trump administration, the brief suggests.

Yet the federal lawyers also stressed that the lawsuit itself “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive” since the FDA may decide on its own to impose the restrictions Louisiana is demanding — citing the review of the drugs’ safety that FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have both said is now underway. Additionally, the brief warns, allowing Louisiana’s challenge to move forward could set a precedent that allows lawsuits from progressive states seeking looser regulation of the pills to advance.

Still, the new filing in the Louisiana case is likely to exacerbate the anti-abortion movement’s frustration with the Trump administration over the lack of federal action in his second term to curb the availability of the pills — which are used in more than two-thirds of all U.S. abortions.

The move is similar to the administration’s stance in a separate case last year, in which the Justice Department argued that three other red states — Idaho, Kansas and Missouri — lacked standing to challenge the FDA’s authority to decide whether and how patients can access abortion pills.

Louisiana’s lawsuit, filed last October, seeks to reimpose past federal restrictions on mifepristone that would wipe out access to the drugs across much of the country — particularly in rural areas where clinics are scarce.

In particular, the lawsuit asks courts to reinstate the requirement that patients can only obtain the pills in person from a physician, banning the increasingly common practices of telemedicine prescription and mail delivery of the pills that the Biden administration permitted. Recent data collected by the pro-abortion rights research group Society of Family Planning estimated that, as of June 2025, more than a quarter of U.S. abortions were provided via telemedicine.

A hearing in the case is scheduled for Feb. 24.

Another pending challenge, filed by Florida in December, seeks to go further and impose a nationwide ban on the pills.