Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dust off the Comstock Act to target abortion rights

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

70% : "Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticised the apparent "mismatch" between the injury claimed by anti-abortion doctors and the remedy they seek.
66% : Even if the court rejects the challenge from anti-abortion activists, two years after the landmark decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, medication abortion will still be illegal in more than a dozen states that have imposed effective bans on abortion care altogether.
65% : But to mitigate that hypothetical risk, anti-abortion activists propose "sweeping nationwide relief that restricts access to mifepristone for every single woman in this country, and that causes profound harm," she said.
62% : The US Supreme Court appears unlikely to agree with anti-abortion activists who want to overturn the federal government's approval of a widely used abortion drug, a proposal that could have profound and far-reaching consequences for millions of Americans' healthcare.
61% : A majority of justices on the nine-member court on Tuesday were sceptical that a group of anti-abortion doctors have sufficient legal grounds to bring the case against the US Food and Drug Administration, which first approved the drug mifepristone in the year 2000.
58% : He questioned why litigation from a handful of anti-abortion doctors is "turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule.
55% : It largely floundered under a series of congressional actions and the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v Wade 100 years later, but anti-abortion activists - as well as a federal judge who agreed to ban mifepristone, triggering the latest Supreme Court battle - have invoked the law following a decades-long anti-abortion crusade from conservative Christian legal groups.
55% : "Most of Tuesday's arguments did not focus on the far-reaching implications that targeting the FDA approval process would have for both the pharmaceutical industry and people who depend on prescription drugs, but on whether the anti-abortion doctors who launched the complaint have any legal standing to do so.
50% : In November 2022, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit targeting mifepristone from Amarillo, Texas on behalf of a group of anti-abortion physicians incorporated as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was organised that same month with an address in Amarillo.US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk - who was appointed by Donald Trump - later issued the ruling to suspend the FDA's approval of the drug, triggering appeals that were kicked up to the nation's highest court.
44% : In 2022, the US Department of Justice clarified that the Comstock Act does not apply to mailing mifepristone or misoprostol, the drugs used for the two-drug protocol for a medication abortion, a procedure that accounts for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US.
37% : "Erin Hawley, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal group leading the Supreme Court challenge, also argued to the justices that the Comstock Act prohibits abortion drugs by mail.
12% : "So who's your person?"Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of three justices appointed to the court by Donald Trump, appeared to condemn Judge Kacsmaryk's decision, casting it among "rash" lower-court decisions with overly broad consequences.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.