A federal appeals court has cleared the way for West Virginia to press ahead with one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws—this time taking aim at mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill.
In a 2-1 decision, the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug doesn’t override the state’s power to limit or even ban its use. The court effectively said: federal greenlight or not, West Virginia’s restrictions stand.
Mifepristone, approved by the FDA back in 2000, is part of a two-pill regimen that accounts for the majority of abortions across the country. But under the state’s Unborn Child Protection Act, its use is heavily curtailed. The law allows only narrow exceptions, like early-term access for underage rape and incest survivors.
The case was brought by GenBioPro, a Nevada-based manufacturer of generic mifepristone, arguing that state-level bans defy federal drug regulation and set a perilous precedent. But the court wasn’t convinced.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, writing for the majority, made it plain: absent explicit direction from Congress, the courtroom isn’t the place to rewrite abortion law. In fact, he warned, striking down West Virginia’s law could be seen as flipping the bird to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which handed abortion regulation back to the states.
Wilkinson didn’t mince words. Letting GenBioPro win, he said, would yank abortion policy back into federal hands just as the Supreme Court said the opposite. “Disregarding the Supreme Court is not an option,” he wrote.
The lone dissent came from Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin, who warned the law could gut access to vital care, particularly for patients in rural, medically underserved communities. She saw in West Virginia’s ban a dangerous step backward that Congress never intended.
Meanwhile, West Virginia’s Republican leadership was quick to claim victory. Governor Patrick Morrisey, who previously defended the ban as attorney general, called it a “big win” for what he described as the state’s “efforts to protect life.”
The ruling makes the Fourth Circuit the first federal appeals court to explicitly uphold a state-level restriction on mifepristone. This comes just a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a national effort to roll back the FDA’s approval of the drug—a reminder that the legal landscape on abortion medication remains volatile and deeply divided.
The case, *GenBioPro Inc. v. Raynes et al.*, could well be headed for another round at the high court. And with nearly 30 states already placing limitations on medication abortions, the ripple effects could reach far beyond West Virginia.
