Attorney General Knudsen joins coalition defending states’ rights to prohibit telehealth abortions

HELENA – Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen joined a coalition of 21 state attorneys general in supporting a Louisiana lawsuit challenging a Biden-era rule that expanded access to abortion drugs through mail and telehealth, that disregards states’ prerogatives to protect prenatal life granted in the Dobbs decision.

In an amicus brief filed in Louisiana v FDA, the attorneys general asked the United States District Court Western District of Louisiana to preliminarily enjoin a 2023 Food and Drug Administration rule, a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), that removes long-standing safeguards on the chemical abortion drug mifepristone and allowed doctors in one state to prescribe abortion pills to patients in another. The rule is a violation of states’ sovereign rights as states like Louisiana, through its democratic process, enacted limitations on chemical abortions.

“The Supreme Court unequivocally held that ‘the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,’ the attorney general wrote. “Yet the 2023 REMs attempts to usurp the States’ prerogatives on chemical abortion and federalize it. Nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government this power.”

The REMS harm states’ sovereign interest in enforcing its own laws as this rule permits states like California and New York to set abortion policy for pro-life states by enabling telehealth prescriptions that state law may prohibit.

“The 2023 REMS was a direct attack on theses States’ duly enacted laws, striking at the very heart of state sovereignty. Not only that, but States have suffered pocketbook harms that they otherwise would not have borne,” the attorneys general wrote.

For example, the REMS has already cost Louisiana taxpayers at least $92,000. A doctor in New York can prescribe mifepristone to a Louisiana patient with virtually no consequence and if that patient suffers some complication, the Louisiana medical system must treat it.

Attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming also joined the Nebraska-led brief.