Republicans Can—and Will—Keep Trying to Ban Mifepristone

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine only incorporated as a group in the weeks after Dobbs. They chose to file in August 2022 for incorporation in Amarillo, Texas, perhaps the most favorable jurisdiction in the country for the case they would soon bring against mifepristone. Unsurprisingly, they apparently did not conduct any programs or activities in Amarillo and seemingly only created the organization for the purpose of bringing suit. Then, with a paltry annual income of less than $50,000, they got the legal team that won the Dobbs case to represent them, brought their case before Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge all but handpicked to favor them, and, within months, were headed to the Supreme Court. It’s not much of a mystery how this happened, as neither group tried very hard to conceal the paper trail. “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is nothing more than a brand name that Alliance Defending Freedom used to shop this abortion pill case up to the Supreme Court,” Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable.US, told The New Republic in March. 

It’s not the first time Alliance Defending Freedom has all but manufactured a plaintiff for the sake of advancing one of its broader goals—whether that was  attacking abortion access, as it did in this case, or providing legal cover for anti-LGBTQ discrimination, as it did last year. In that case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court ruled in favor of ADF’s client, a web designer who claimed she was injured by anti-discrimination laws that would apply if she refused to design a website for a same-sex wedding. (The same-sex-wedding website request she claimed to have received, as The New Republic reported last June, came from a same-sex couple who do not exist.) In the case of AHM v. FDA, where again Alliance Defending Freedom’s client had in essence manufactured an injury, the court has decided not to go along.

“Here, the plaintiff doctors and medical associations are unregulated parties who seek to challenge FDA’s regulation of others,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the court. While the plaintiffs offered “several complicated causation theories” to connect the FDA to whatever alleged harm mifepristone caused them, “none of these theories suffices” to establish their standing to bring the case.