(DCNF)—The Supreme Court seemed skeptical Tuesday of a challenge brought by doctors and medical associations to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to roll back safety regulations for the abortion pill.
During oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the justices questioned whether doctors’ claims to harm were sufficient to justify their challenge to the agency’s removal of regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. The OB/GYNs and emergency room doctors who brought the case argue that women are more likely to require medical treatment as a result of removing safety standards, putting them in a position where they may have to surgically finish an incomplete chemical abortion in violation of their conscience to address complications.
In 2021, the FDA enabled mifepristone to be distributed through the mail and removed the requirement for an initial in-person visit. In 2016, the agency removed many of the other safeguards put in place when the pill was approved in 2000, such as allowing it to be used through ten weeks of pregnancy instead of seven.
“This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule, or any other federal government action,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch, pointing to a recent “rash of universal injunctions” that run contrary to how the court has historically granted relief.
“There are exactly zero universal injunctions that were issued during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 12 years in office — pretty consequential ones,” Gorsuch said. “And over the last four years or so, the number is something like 60, maybe more than that. They’re a relatively new thing.”
The Fifth Circuit narrowed in August a district court’s earlier injunction requiring the FDA to reverse its initial approval of the pill. The appeals court held that the doctors’ initial challenge to the FDA’s 2000 approval of the drug was untimely, but agreed that the agency “failed to address several important concerns” when it loosened restrictions on mifepristone after 2016.
Pro-life advocates and abortion activists are holding competing rallies outside the Supreme Court ahead of oral arguments this morning in the abortion pills case. @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/0qtVjv9BGb
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) March 26, 2024
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked whether relief could be more narrowly tailored to deal with the doctor’s specific conscience objections. Chief Justice Roberts made a similar point.
“Why can’t the court specify that this relief runs to precisely the parties before the court, as opposed to looking to the agency in general?” Roberts questioned.
Justices Amy Coney Barret, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor carefully probed the specifics of the doctors’ conscience objections.
Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erin Hawley, who argued for the doctors, pointed to Dr. Ingrid Skop and Dr. Christina Francis as the best examples. Skop wrote in her declaration filed with the court that the FDA’s actions may force her to “end the life of a human being in the womb for no medical reason,” noting she has “cared for at least a dozen women who have required surgery to remove retained pregnancy tissue after a chemical abortion.
Kagan noted that most hospitals have “mechanisms in place” to allow doctors to voice their objections.
Justice Samuel Alito questioned what potential plaintiffs would have standing if the doctors do not. He said the government’s argument leaves the American people with “no remedy” for the FDA violating the law.
“Your argument is that it doesn’t matter if FDA flagrantly violated the law, didn’t do what it should have done, endangered the health of women — that’s just too bad,” he told Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “Nobody can sue in court.”
“Do you think the FDA is infallible?” he later asked. Jackson made the reverse point, questioning whether courts have the authority to reconsider the judgements of expert agencies.
Justice Clarence Thomas voiced questions of potential violations of the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits mailing of any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
“My problem is that you are private,” he told the attorney for abortion pill maker Danco Laboratories. “The statute doesn’t have this sort of safe harbor that you are suggesting … It specifically covers drugs such as yours.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
