A Louisiana father secretly slipped abortion pills into his pregnant daughter's food.
She went into premature labor, and that baby is now fighting for life in a Lafayette NICU.
Now a federal appeals court is deciding whether the drug that put her there stays legal to mail into every state that banned it.
How One Biden Rule Turned Mifepristone Into a Mail-Order Abortion Pill Superhighway
Before 2023, a woman needed an in-person visit with a doctor to get mifepristone.
That visit did two things.
It confirmed she was under the FDA's 10-week limit.
It ruled out an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that can kill a woman who takes the pill without knowing she has one.
In January 2023, the Biden administration threw out that safeguard.
Even the Obama administration had left it in place.
The result was not subtle.
Abortions have nearly doubled nationwide since Dobbs overturned Roe, driven largely by the pill.
Nearly two out of three online abortion pill vendors ignore the 10-week limit entirely.
A growing tracker of women poisoned, tricked, or forced into taking the drug keeps adding names.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has a name for what the Biden rule actually built.
"The whole point of it was to facilitate a superhighway of mail-order drugs that could be sent into our states, even though it's illegal," she said.
The Same Standing Fight the Supreme Court Already Killed Once
This is not pro-life states' first run at this rule.
In 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out a nearly identical challenge brought by a group of doctors.
The justices ruled the doctors had not suffered a direct enough injury to sue.
Louisiana is trying again with a different plaintiff and a different injury: a state, not a doctor, paying real Medicaid bills and running real emergency rooms.
On Wednesday, two judges appointed by former President Obama spent the Fifth Circuit hearing pushing back on that theory too.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins did not like what he saw.
"The Fifth Circuit panel could hardly have been more hostile toward Louisiana's effort to protect women and enforce its laws protecting unborn children," Perkins said.
The ACLU is already calling Louisiana's case baseless.
Tell that to the family in the Lafayette NICU.
A Lafayette NICU Baby Is Liz Murrill's Exhibit A
Murrill says an estimated 1,000 abortions a month are happening inside Louisiana through the mail, in a state where abortion is illegal.
"That number comes from abortion industry statistics," she said.
"Those aren't our numbers that we're making up," she added.
She said Louisiana taxpayers cover the bill through Medicaid every time a woman shows up in an emergency room after taking the pill without medical supervision.
Then there is the baby in Lafayette, and Murrill did not wait to be asked about it.
"We have a baby in a NICU unit in Lafayette right now who was prematurely delivered after the girl's father basically put these pills in her food without her knowledge and induced early labor," she said.
Louisiana is also up against shield laws that other states passed specifically to make it nearly impossible to prosecute anyone for mailing the pills in the first place.
"It's a complicated problem, and I think the federal government should be working with us to prevent this problem from occurring because it is unsafe for women," Murrill said.
The FDA Safety Review Everyone Is Still Waiting On
The Trump administration did not reinstate the in-person requirement when it took office in January 2025.
Instead, the FDA opened a safety review of mifepristone that has now run for months with no result.
Trump's instincts on the abortion pill have never been the problem.
The pace at the FDA is.
A federal judge in a separate mifepristone case just paused those proceedings until after this November's midterms.
Every clock in this fight seems to run out past Election Day.
Senator Tommy Tuberville has publicly called on the administration to reevaluate mifepristone's safety.
Murrill wants the same urgency the government found during COVID, when Medicare and Medicaid regulators adopted emergency vaccine mandate rules almost overnight.
"The FDA could act very swiftly if it wanted to," she said.
"I think they can if they want to," she added.
A father in Lafayette already knows what happens while everyone else waits.
Sources:
- Dan Hart, "Appeals Court Appears Unlikely to Stop Mail-Order Abortions," LifeNews.com, September 11, 2026.
- "Fifth Circuit questions Louisiana's renewed attempt to block abortion pill mailing," Courthouse News Service, September 2026.
- FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. ___ (2024), Supreme Court of the United States.
- Tony Perkins, post on X, September 9, 2026.
- Liz Murrill, interview on "This Week on Capitol Hill," September 2026.
- Office of Senator Tommy Tuberville, "Tuberville Calls on Trump Administration to Reevaluate Safety of Dangerous Abortion Pill," tuberville.senate.gov.
- "FDA Launches Safety Study for Abortion Pill Mifepristone," CBS News, June 2026.
- "Federal judge pauses case on mifepristone access until after midterm elections," Stateline, August 31, 2026.
