Enlarge / Demonstrators participate in an abortion-rights rally outside the Supreme Court as the justices of the court hear oral arguments in the case of the US Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine on March 26, 2024 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Anna Moneymaker )

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a case seeking to limit access to the abortion and miscarriage drug mifepristone, with a majority of justices expressing skepticism that the anti-abortion groups that brought the case have the legal standing to do so.

The case threatens to dramatically alter access to a drug that has been safely used for decades and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, was used in 63 percent of abortions documented in the health care system in 2023 . But, it also has sweeping implications for the Food and Drug Administration's authority over drugs, marking the first time that courts have second-guessed the agency's expert scientific analysis and moved to restrict access to an FDA-approved drug.

As such, the case has rattled health experts, reproductive health care advocates, the FDA, and the pharmaceutical industry alike. But, based on the line of questioning in today's oral arguments, they have reason to breathe a sigh of relief.

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Three landmark Supreme Court decisions in 2022 have each been widely criticized by health experts as threats to public health, but a study released Thursday in JAMA Network Open modeled their collective toll. The study found that, by conservative estimates, the decisions will lead to thousands of deaths in the coming years, with tens of thousands more being harmed.

The three decisions included: one from January 13, 2022, that invalidated some COVID-19 workplace protections ( National Federation of Independent Business v Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ); one on June 23, 2022, that voided some state laws restricting handgun carry ( New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc v Superintendent of New York State Police (Bruen) ); and one on June 24, 2022, that revoked the constitutional right to abortion ( Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ).

A group of health researchers, led by Adam Gaffney at Harvard University, modeled how these decisions would impact Americans' morbidity and mortality in the near future.

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After song lyrics website Genius sued Google in 2019 for allegedly breaching its terms of service by copying its lyrics transcriptions in search results, the United States Supreme Court invited the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, to weigh in on how the US viewed the case. The question before Prelogar was whether federal copyright law preempted Genius' terms of service, which prohibits any of its website visitors from copying lyrics for commercial uses.

Yesterday, Prelogar responded, filing a brief that sided with Google. She denied that Genius' case was a good vehicle to test whether copyright law preempted state-law contract claims and recommended that the court deny Genius' petition to review the case.

The key issue was that Genius' terms of service may not be a valid contract, because website visitors don't have to directly agree to the website's terms and may not even be aware they exist. Because of this, Prelogar said it was unclear whether any court would find that Google—or any visitor to Genius' site—ever agreed to not copy the lyrics. Reviewing Genius' arguments, Prelogar said that the Supreme Court should not review the case because "there is little indication that any other court of appeals would reach a different outcome in this case."