Group files brief urging FDA's reinstatement of abortion pill restriction

(Liberty Counsel) Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana v. FDA, a case seeking to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement for the chemical abortion drug Mifepristone. In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration loosened safety regulations allowing the dangerous drug to be distributed through the mail without in-person medical supervision. Liberty Counsel urges the Fifth Circuit to restore the more stringent FDA safety rules on the grounds that the FDA improperly relaxed those safeguards, and because easy access to chemical abortion drugs serves as a “tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Liberty Counsel submitted the brief on behalf of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and the Douglass Leadership Institute, a group of nonprofit faith organizations that represent or minister to more than 70,000 people in Hispanic and African American communities across the United States.

In the brief, Liberty Counsel argues that the FDA removed Mifepristone’s safeguards without adequately addressing whether the drug would be safe for women. As a result, widespread abortion access is exposing unmonitored women to dangerous complications and reinstating the restrictions would correct the FDA’s failure to ensure drug safety.

In addition to administrative lapses, Liberty Counsel raises the question of “why” Mifepristone is “owned by the Population Council,” an organization “founded by eugenicists with a nefarious history of promoting population control.”

When the eugenics movement fell out of favor with the fall of Nazi Germany, John D. Rockefeller III in 1952 founded the Population Council to advance eugenic population control, but under different guises, which today include “reproductive health,” “reproductive choice,” and “family planning.” 

The Population Council has routinely provided “funding, research, and advocacy to legitimize and expand access to abortion” to reduce minority birth rates and preserve the “quality” of the population according to their standards, wrote Liberty Counsel. 

“Many eugenicists drew ‘the distinction between the fit and the unfit ... along racial lines,’” the brief reads.  Eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and her colleagues used terms like “unfit” and “feeble-minded” as “code words for the poor, blacks, and other minorities.”

Building on that history, the Population Council’s ownership of Mifepristone represents a continuation of these eugenic goals, noted Liberty Counsel. 

For years, Planned Parenthood has “intentionally located 86 percent of its abortion facilities in or near minority neighborhoods in the 25 U.S. counties with the most abortions,” wrote Liberty Counsel. “These 25 counties contain 19 percent of the U.S. population, including 28 percent of the African American population and 37 percent of the Hispanic/Latino population. In 12 of these counties, Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos are more than 50 percent of the population. In comparison, African Americans are only 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, and Hispanics and Latinos are 16.3 percent.”

“The public interest is not served by a regulation that turns the mail into an instrument of a eugenicist agenda,” and reinstating Mifepristone’s safety protocols would stop abortion from becoming “a tool of modern-day eugenics,” concluded Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel’s brief recommends the Fifth Circuit reverse a lower court decision that denied restoring the FDA’s safety rules. 

On May 8, 2026, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals preliminarily ruled that the FDA must reinstate the in-person requirement for dispensing Mifepristone. However, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 to administratively block that ruling and keep mail-order access to Mifepristone available while the Fifth Circuit reaches a permanent decision. 

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Abortion is directly rooted in the eugenics movement. Today, chemical abortions are a disturbingly effective tool to murder unborn babies in the womb, especially in minority communities, thus continuing the discriminatory practices of eugenics. Chemical abortions harm women physically and emotionally and cruelly kill defenseless children. The FDA can no longer be allowed to ignore Mifepristone’s safety dangers and allow a eugenic drug unfettered access by mail to destroy innocent lives and harm women.”