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The Supreme Court hears its first abortion case since ending Roe

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Nearly two-thirds of the Americans who choose to end their pregnancies now do so using pills. Medication abortion has been an increasingly popular option since 2000, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first approved mifepristone as part of a two-drug regimen with misoprostol. More recently, the FDA widened the window during which the medicine may be used and eased dispensing requirements. But on March 26th the Supreme Court will consider whether these loosened regulations should be tightened back up.

FDA v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine began as an assault on the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone. In April 2023 the district-court judge in Texas who heard the case invalidated the authorisation from 2000 and each of the subsequent liberalisations. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals kept mifepristone on the shelves when it pared back this extraordinary ruling last August. But the appeals court agreed that the 2016 and 2021 changes—allowing the drug to be used through ten weeks of pregnancy (up from seven) and to be sent to women by post with a remote prescription—had to go.

The plaintiffs will be represented at the Supreme Court by Erin Hawley, wife of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. They contend that the FDA violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how agencies operate, when it expanded access to the purportedly “high risk” drug in 2016 and 2021. The changes in 2016 followed a “piecemeal analysis” of insufficient data, the Alliance writes, and the action of 2021 relied on “unreliable” information. Lifting “long-existing and common-sense safety standards” was “arbitrary and capricious” and thus “unreasonable”.

The federal government and Danco, which markets mifepristone as Mifeprex, paint the FDA’s decisions in a rosier light. The move in 2016 was based on “an enormous and highly reliable data set”, the government says. The decision to allow pills-by-post in 2021 was informed by “extensive published literature”, plus more than two decades of women safely using mifepristone. Emergencies arise in at most 0.7% of cases, making the medicine safer than Viagra or penicillin.

The two sides will surely debate the wisdom of the FDA’s moves in next week’s oral argument. But the question of standing could dominate the conversation: whether the challengers have the legal right to bring the case. The Supreme Court has held that fierce opposition to a policy is no grounds to sue the government. Litigants must show they have suffered a “concrete injury” with a clear causal link.

The plaintiffs advance a host of arguments to claim standing. Their main contention is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine: pro-life doctors could be forced to violate their conscience if no one else is available to complete terminations for women rushed to the emergency room after complications from a medical abortion prescribed elsewhere. This “long chain of contingencies” stemming from “an exceedingly rare serious adverse event” is purely speculative, the government argues: the plaintiffs have not named “even a single doctor among their thousands of members who has ever been required to perform an abortion in the decades mifepristone has been on the market”.

The Supreme Court arguably bent the rules of standing last year in a case that dashed President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel student loans. But the winding argument from mifepristone’s foesand the legal adventurism of the lower courts—may stretch too far even for the five justices who dispatched Roe v Wade in 2022.

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Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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