The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to sharply restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone — taking the same position as the Biden administration in a closely watched case that has major implications for abortion access.
The court filing by the Justice Department is striking, given that President Trump and a number of officials in his administration have forcefully opposed abortion rights. Mr. Trump often boasts that he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the national right to abortion. And so far in his second term, his administration has taken steps to curtail programs that support reproductive health.
The filing is the first time the Trump administration has weighed in on the lawsuit, which seeks to reverse numerous regulatory changes that the Food and Drug Administration made over the past decade that greatly expanded access to mifepristone.
The Trump administration’s request makes no mention of the merits of the case, which have not yet been considered by the courts. Rather, echoing the argument that the Biden administration made shortly before Mr. Trump took office, the court filing asserts that the case does not meet the legal standard to be heard in the federal district court in which it was filed.
The case was filed by the conservative attorneys general of three states — Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas — before Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee who strongly opposes abortion.
“The states do not dispute that their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing.
“Regardless of the merits of the states’ claims, the states cannot proceed in this court,” they concluded, adding that the complaint “should be dismissed or transferred for lack of venue.”
Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, said that the Trump administration’s support of the Biden administration’s earlier request to dismiss the case “is surprising, but I think the best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone.”
She said the filing “avoids saying anything on the substance at all,” which, she suggested, allows the Trump administration to delay telegraphing its views on mifepristone and to control whether and when it takes action to restrict the drug.
Mr. Trump’s political calculus on abortion has changed since his first term. Although Republicans prevailed in the 2024 elections, so did abortion rights, with ballot measures to protect abortion access winning in several conservative states, including Missouri. Voters in Kansas, one of the other plaintiffs in the case, endorsed abortion rights in 2022, a year when Democrats made strong gains in Congress partly because of a backlash against Republicans over abortion. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump tried to adjust to the changing political winds on the issue, sometimes taking positions that frustrated social conservatives.
Ms. Ziegler said Monday’s court filing might reflect a desire to be politically cautious on abortion, possibly until the 2026 midterm elections.
“I think he thinks that doing anything bold on mifepristone could backfire politically,” she said. “But he has a lot of anti-abortion voters who are not only hoping that he will do something on mifepristone but are still expecting that he will.”
“There hasn’t been a merits ruling in this case yet,” she added, “so I think the strategy of sort of avoiding the merits and kicking the can down the road is working well for Trump at the moment, but it’s sort of unclear whether it’s sustainable.”
The next step in the case will be for Judge Kacsmaryk to decide whether to dismiss it or allow it to proceed.
If the lawsuit succeeded, it could have wide-ranging impact on access to abortion in the United States, where abortion pills now account for nearly two-thirds of pregnancy terminations.
Among the F.D.A. measures the lawsuit seeks to reverse is a provision that removed the requirement that patients visit prescribers in person to obtain mifepristone. Reinstating the in-person requirement would halt the fast-growing practice of prescribing abortion pills through telemedicine and mailing them to patients, including those in states with abortion bans.
“Removing the in-person dispensing protections enabled a 50-state mail-order abortion drug economy,” the attorneys general wrote in their complaint. The lawsuit also seeks to reverse the agency’s approval of generic mifepristone, now the most widely used form of the drug; the ability for nurse practitioners and other health providers who are not doctors to prescribe mifepristone; and the ability for retail pharmacies, like CVS and Walgreens, to dispense the medication.
And it asks for new F.D.A. restrictions on mifepristone, including to outlaw the medication for anyone under 18.
The lawsuit argues that actions by the F.D.A. that expanded access to mifepristone have allowed women to obtain abortion pills despite state abortion bans or restrictions. Because of this, it says, health systems in states where abortion is limited or outlawed are required to treat patients who visit emergency rooms for follow-up care or abortion complications, costing the states money. It also claims that such states have been harmed because the “loss of fetal life and potential births” reduces the “potential population of each state.”
The lawsuit also contends that the F.D.A. violated the Comstock Act, a rarely enforced anti-vice law from 1873 that prohibits mailing items “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” A 2022 opinion by the Justice Department said that the law should not be interpreted to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills in most cases. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has not rescinded or changed that opinion.
The case was initially filed in November 2022 by a consortium of anti-abortion doctors and groups and made its way to the Supreme Court. But in a unanimous ruling in June, the justices threw out the case, saying that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they couldn’t show they had been harmed by the F.D.A.’s decisions on mifepristone.
A few months later, the three attorneys general revived the lawsuit and filed an amended complaint in the same court in Texas before Judge Kacsmaryk. In the first iteration of the case, Judge Kacsmaryk issued rulings that stridently criticized the F.D.A. and adopted much of the terminology used by anti-abortion activists.
Abortion pills are prescribed up to 12 weeks into pregnancy in the United States. Women in states with abortion bans have increasingly sought abortion pills through telemedicine providers.
Currently, 19 states have bans or restrictions stricter than the standard set by Roe v. Wade. In states that support abortion rights, telemedicine abortion providers have expanded, and a number of states have passed shield laws that protect doctors and other health providers who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states with bans or restrictions.
The typical medication abortion regimen involves mifepristone, which blocks a hormone needed for pregnancy development, followed 24 to 48 hours later by misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to those during a miscarriage.
Mifepristone was approved for abortion 25 years ago. Misoprostol, which has long been widely available for several medical conditions, can terminate a pregnancy on its own, but the lawsuit does not seek any restrictions on misoprostol. Decades of research has found the pills to be safe, and serious complications rare.
In January, shortly before Mr. Trump took office, the Biden Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing several reasons, including that the Texas court was the wrong venue. The motion also said that the three states had not shown that they had been concretely harmed by the F.D.A.’s mifepristone regulations and that the states had not taken required steps to first seek the regulatory rollback through F.D.A.’s administrative channels.
The Trump administration’s court filing cites the same reasons. “The states also contend that F.D.A.’s actions have made it easier for individuals ‘to evade state laws,’” the brief said.
“But even assuming that were true,” it said, “the mere fact that someone might violate state law” does not on its own injure a state government in a way that meets the legal standard to sue.
Trump administration officials have previously said little about whether they intend to roll back access to mifepristone. Last month, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Martin A. Makary, said during an interview at a journalism conference that he had “no plans to take action on mifepristone.” But he also said that “there is an ongoing set of data that is coming into F.D.A. on mifepristone.”
“So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, then I — we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data that we have not yet seen,” he added.
In addition to the F.D.A., the two manufacturers of mifepristone are defendants in the case. Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the branded version of the drug, requested to be added to the case soon after the original filing in 2022. GenBioPro, which makes generic mifepristone, became a party last month after it requested to be added in anticipation that the Trump administration might not fully support the F.D.A.’s actions regarding the medication.