A federal appeals court has restricted access to one of the most common means of abortion in the U.S. by blocking the mailing of mifepristone. A panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is requiring that the abortion pill be distributed only in-person at clinics. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed enforcement of abortion bans, prescriptions by mail has become a major way that abortions are provided — including to states where bans are in place. The decision sets up a likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

A federal appeals court has restricted access to one of the most common means of abortion in the U.S. by blocking mailing of prescriptions of mifepristone.

A panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is requiring that the abortion pill be distributed only in person at clinics.

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” the ruling states.

Judges have long deferred to the Food and Drug Administration’s judgments on the safety and appropriate regulation of drugs.

FDA officials under President Donald Trump have repeatedly stated the agency is conducting a new review of mifepristone’s safety, at the direction of the president.

The judges noted in their ruling that FDA “could not say when that review might be complete and admitted it was still collecting data.”

In a court filing, Louisiana’s attorney general and a woman who says she was coerced into taking abortion pills requested that the FDA rules be rolled back to when the pills were allowed to be prescribed and dispensed only in person.

A Louisiana-based federal judge last month ruled that those allowances undermined the state’s abortion ban but stopped short of undoing the regulations immediately.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed enforcement of abortion bans, prescriptions by mail have become a major way that abortions are provided — including to states where bans are in place.

“This is going to affect patients’ access to abortion and miscarriage care in every state in the nation,” said Julia Kaye, an ACLU lawyer. “When telemedicine is restricted, rural communities, people with low incomes, people with disabilities, survivors of intimate partner violence and communities of color suffer the most.”

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 as a safe and effective way to end early pregnancies. It is typically used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol.

Because of rare cases of excessive bleeding, the FDA initially imposed strict limits on who could prescribe and distribute the pill — only specially certified physicians and only after an in-person appointment where the person would receive the pill.

Both those requirements were dropped during the COVID-19 years. At the time, FDA officials under President Joe Biden said that after more than 20 years of monitoring mifepristone use, and reviewing dozens of studies involving thousands of women, it was clear that women could safely use the pill without direct supervision.

Friday’s ruling sets up a likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

The conservative-majority high court overturned abortion as a nationwide right in 2022 but unanimously preserved access to mifepristone two years later.

That 2024 decision sidestepped the core issues, however, by ruling that the anti-abortion doctors behind the case didn’t have legal standing to sue.

Thousands are set to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day on Friday, as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.

May Day has long been an annual day of protest for the labor movement, and this year, many active movements are converging to fight for “a nation that puts workers over billionaires”. Demanding no ICE, no war, and taxing the rich, the May Day Strong coalition includes labor unions, immigrants rights groups, political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organizers behind the No Kings protests. Friday’s economic disruption builds on a similar coordinated effort out of Minnesota in January, when tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents took off from school and work to flood the streets in protest of federal immigration agents storming the city.

Neidi Dominguez, founding executive director of Organized Power in Numbers and an executive team member of May Day Strong, said that they expect more than twice the number of May Day events than last year.

Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, one of the main organizations behind No Kings, described the May Day economic blackout as a “structure test” for the movement.

“We are asking people to take a step into further exerting their power in all aspects of their lives – as workers, as students, as members of local organizing hubs,” she said. “It’s important as it builds muscles towards greater non-cooperation.”

Teachers’ unions and students are an active part of the fight, a continuation of their months of organizing against ICE. At least 15 school districts in North Carolina have given teachers the day off to join a statewide May Day “Kids Over Corporations” rally for public education funding. In Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union fought and won to have May Day made a “day of civic action”.

“As educators, we feel a very real accountability to the young people in the families that we serve,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and Illinois Federation of Teachers, said earlier this week. “We want to connect people not just to the affordability crisis but the crisis of our institutions being marginalized in this moment and the impact on our young people.”

Sanshray Kukutla, a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and organizer with the campus’s Sunrise Movement chapter, is helping coordinate a local walkout for students, teachers, workers and residents. “We’re taking collective action to send a message to the billionaire class: it’s our labor, our spending, and our participation that keeps the whole system running, and if we don’t work, they don’t have profits,” said Kukutla.

Organizers say the day of action is an effort to build toward a general strike, which was essentially outlawed through the 1946 Taft-Hartley Act and hasn’t happened in the US since. As a workaround, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has called for unions to work toward a general strike on 1 May 2028, by having existing union contracts expire in unison.