The attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri, seeking to establish the states’ standing to challenge the federal government’s liberalized rules for medication abortion, claim that expanded access to the abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.” This remarkable assertion comes on Page 189 of the states’ 199-page complaint….
The states’ complaint is larded with provocative and irrelevant photographs: someone carrying shopping bags said to contain abortion pills; a pile of empty pill vials; a picture of an embryo, in reality not more than an inch long, blown up to huge baby-like proportions. The states claim that the F.D.A.’s actions have caused “immeasurable pain and suffering” and [have] harmed “many women,” assertions refuted by the facts on the ground. Serious complications have been rare with the two-pill regime of mifepristone and misoprostol, which now accounts for nearly two-thirds of abortions.
