The Biden administration has petitioned for the Supreme Court to intervene against restrictions imposed on the chemical abortion drug mifepristone, claiming that limits on the drug are “damaging for women and healthcare providers around the Nation.”

In a legal filing on Friday, the Department of Justice said that the high court should not uphold limits placed on mifepristone that were set forth by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that would prohibit the distribution of the pills through the mail or prescribed via telemedicine. The limits placed on the drug cannot be implemented until the Supreme Court issues a ruling on the decision. 

“The effect of the lower court’s decisions would be to compel FDA to return to a pre-2016 regulatory regime that imposes restrictions on distribution that FDA has found to be unnecessary and unjustified,” the DOJ said in a cert petition. 

The DOJ said that mifepristone, used in up to half of all abortions, was “best method” to end the life of an unborn child early in development. 

Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of a widely used abortion pill, also said in a Friday legal filing that the Supreme Court should throw out the Fifth Circuit’s limits on the drug. 

“For the women and teenage girls, health care providers, and States that depend on FDA’s actions to ensure safe and effective reproductive health care is available, this case matters tremendously,” wrote Jessica Ellsworth, a lawyer representing Danco. “And for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, permitting judicial second-guessing of FDA’s scientific evaluations of data will have a wildly destabilizing effect.”

The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom sued to stop the distribution and approval of the drug by the FDA. ADF lawyers have said that agency’s decision to approve mifepristone was political. 

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“The FDA’s unprecedented and unlawful actions did not reflect scientific judgment but rather revealed politically driven decisions to push a dangerous drug regimen without regard to women’s health or the rule of law. This is a significant victory for the doctors and medical associations we represent and, more importantly, the health and safety of women,” ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley said after the Fifth Circuit upheld restrictions of the drug last month. 

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case in its coming fall session after previously putting a stay on a broader federal judge order to fully suspend approval for the pill.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Biden administration cannot coerce or “significantly encourage” social media companies to censor content, saying that previous actions of the administration had violated the First Amendment. 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday partially upheld a lower court’s ruling in Missouri vs. Biden barring the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control, the White House, and the surgeon general from being able to pressure social media companies to take down or limit the scope of content the administration didn’t like. The court specifically ruled against a number of officials, including White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

“Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech,” the decision said. “That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making process.”

Documents released by Congress last month show that a White House official asked Facebook to promote legacy outlets and stifle The Daily Wire’s reach in order to accomplish the administration’s directives on suppressing content that clashed with its COVID vaccine agenda. 

The ruling from the appeals court was not as expansive as the original ruling against the Biden administration from U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty. Injunctions against the HHS, the Census Bureau, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were not upheld. 

“If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” then White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty said in a meeting with Facebook in 2021. Flaherty was named as one of the defendants in the case who the injunction applied to.

The decision against the Biden administration, which was first sued by several states including Louisiana and Missouri. The states said in the lawsuit that the Biden administration’s actions were “the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”

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The decision  was celebrated by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. “The First Amendment remains intact,” he posted on X. “The first brick was laid in the wall of separation between tech and state on July 4th, and this ruling is yet another brick.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the decision was “a major win against censorship, totalitarianism, and Biden.”