The abortion pill seems safe for now, but Leonard Leo won’t give up

The Supreme Court doesn’t appear ready to further restrict abortion, at least not yet. It heard a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions to ease access to the abortion drug mifepristone on Tuesday, marking the first major abortion-related case to come before the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade. The majority of the court proved skeptical about the challenge brought by the right-wing Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine for one basic reason: The doctors who brought the original suit couldn’t prove that they are injured by women having access to the drug.

However, that doesn’t mean that medication abortion, which accounted for 63% of abortions in 2023, is safe from future challenges. Hard-right Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas pointed the way for the next challenge: use the still-on-the-books Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibits the distribution of contraception and abortion pills through the mail. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write, “Alito and Thomas know they will likely lose this case, so they’re preparing for the next one.”

So is dark-money overlord Leonard Leo, the architect of the conservative court, who sits at the center of the well-funded networks that brought this case and are cooking up the next ones—and much worse. Leo, along with the Koch network, is pouring millions of dollars into Project 2025, the hard-right’s terrifying blueprint for the next authoritarian Trump administration. Among the fascist items on the Project 2025 agenda is curtailing access to birth control, and the groups are pushing for a future Trump administration to swiftly reimpose restrictions on the abortion pill.