Louisiana’s case against the FDA is not just about one drug.

The 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, supposedly gave states the authority to decide for themselves whether to permit abortion. What should have been apparent then, and is obvious now, is that anti-abortion activists and their allies on the high court were never going to be satisfied with that.

Since October, the state of Louisiana has been seeking to block the distribution of mifepristone, a drug used to induce abortion, through the mail—not just in Louisiana, but anywhere in the United States. The state’s lawsuit against the FDA asserts that the Comstock Act—an anti-obscenity law championed by the 19th-century book burner Anthony Comstock—bans the mailing of abortion medication, and that the federal government wrongly repealed the in-person requirement for prescribing it.

“Louisiana is complaining about reported harms in Louisiana, but they would be imposing a nationwide requirement that patients pick up the pill in person from their health-care provider, even in states that protect abortion access, even in states that explicitly, in their laws, allow for telemedicine provision of mifepristone,” Andrew Beck, an attorney with the ACLU, told me. “Louisiana is really trying to impose its own policy choices on the entire country.”

Medication abortion accounts for about two-thirds of all abortions in the United States, which have actually increased since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization made it possible to send mifepristone through the mail. Providers were first able to mail the drug during the pandemic, a temporary measure that was made permanent by the FDA in 2023. Even in Louisiana, which has a strict anti-abortion law with few exceptions, the number of abortions has risen, according to the state’s lawsuit. This was in part because Louisianans were able to access abortion drugs through providers based in states where the procedure is legal. Indeed—abortion medication has made it possible for women who live far from any clinic to end unwanted pregnancies. Many of those pro-abortion-rights states had passed “shield laws” that protected providers in their jurisdictions from being sued or prosecuted by authorities in anti-abortion states.

Although Louisiana v. FDA is ostensibly about a federal regulatory decision and the safety of an abortion drug, it is really about access to abortion. Louisiana even began its complaint with the declaration that “the fight for life is far from over.” The FDA has asked the court to hold off on a ruling for now, as the Trump administration has said it is conducting its own review of the drug (all medical evidence indicates that mifepristone is safe). In the meantime, two drug companies are asking the courts to allow the continued distribution of mifepristone. The Supreme Court responded to this question on May 14, overturning a lower order that halted distribution and sending the case back for review. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once predicted that overturning Roe would get the Court out of the “abortion-umpiring business.” That prediction has not aged well.

In their dissents to the May 14 ruling, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito showed their hands. Thomas asserted that the Comstock Act banned sending abortion drugs through the mail, and that drug companies seeking to overturn the ruling were “not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise. They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.” Alito, the author of the Dobbs opinion, attempted to maintain the facade that Dobbs allowed pro-abortion-rights states to make it “easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative.” Yet he insisted that allowing providers in states where abortion is legal to mail the drugs to women where it is not was “a scheme to undermine our decision” in Dobbs. So much for the supposed abortion federalism the Court had put in place.

Whatever happens next, the legal battle reveals that the paradise of abortion federalism is a fraud. Either anti-abortion states will get to impose their policies on pro-abortion-rights states, or they will have to live with their residents being able to access abortion care from providers elsewhere.

“Those who oppose abortion are not satisfied with the Supreme Court’s ruling that it should be up to the states to decide abortion policy,” Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “They want a national ban. They’ve always wanted a national ban. And this case, Louisiana v. FDA, is a type of effort to get at least a national ban on medication abortion.”

Lawmakers in anti-abortion states have sought to ban or criminalize the sharing of information about abortion, such as through a Texas proposal that would outlaw providing “information on the method for obtaining an abortion-inducing drug.” Anti-abortion states have tried to sue Planned Parenthood for providing accurate information about the safety of abortion drugs; Florida accused the organization of violating its racketeering law. Early efforts at restricting pregnant women’s travel have been stymied in the courts, but Texas’s bounty law, which allows a private individual to sue anyone who helps someone else get an abortion, is still in effect.

There’s no need to travel, however, if you can get what you need through the mail. Since 2023, the anti-abortion movement’s biggest priority has been trying to block the distribution of abortion medication nationally, either by reversing the FDA’s approval of mailing mifepristone or by getting the Supreme Court to rule that Comstock retains the authority to “enforce evangelical Protestant doctrine regarding sexuality,” as the historian Amy Werbel described the law in Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock.

Although the Comstock Act remains on the books, its prohibition on the distribution of “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” has never been interpreted to cover legal abortions—and wasn’t even before Roe—according to a brief by former Justice Department officials. And its provisions on obscene material have been narrowed by court decisions in the century since its passage. Ironically, Werbel writes, Comstock’s crusades elevated his profile and influence, but also provoked a backlash that led to greater acceptance of birth control and open discussion of sexuality.

The safety of mifepristone is not seriously in question. A brief from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that serious complications from medication abortion are extremely rare, occurring in less than 0.32 percent of cases; death has occurred in 0.00048 percent. A person is more likely to die from taking Viagra or getting a colonoscopy, the brief adds, and far more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications.

If Louisiana succeeded in halting the mailing of mifepristone, people could still access an alternative drug, such as misoprostol, but anti-abortion advocates aren’t simply trying to make one particular drug harder to get, and they surely wouldn’t stop with this case. Access to abortion through telehealth is an “existential threat” to the anti-abortion movement, Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has helped pro-abortion-rights states draft shield laws, told me. “The average number of abortions has gone up, and people in banned states are getting pills. It’s a threat because you can try to police it, but doing so would be very expensive, very intrusive, and it’s probably going to create a massive backlash.” Louisianans probably don’t want cops ransacking their mail any more than New Yorkers do.

Before Dobbs was even issued, abortion-rights advocates knew that red states would try to impose civil liabilities on out-of-state medical professionals. This is because Republicans announced their intentions publicly: In March 2022, two months before the Dobbs opinion was leaked, Missouri Republicans were considering a proposal to impose civil liabilities on anyone who helped a woman get an abortion out of state. Texas’s bounty law, which also applies to out-of-state abortions, was passed in 2021.

Given that anti-abortion advocates see themselves as fighting for life (although not the lives of women dying in anti-abortion states—those don’t seem to count), they were never likely to let state borders confine their efforts. So abortion-rights advocates began pushing for the shield laws; in March 2022, Rebouché and two fellow law professors, David S. Cohen and Greer Donley, made the case for them in The New York Times. Shield laws have been passed in 22 states and Washington, D.C.

“We started to think, Let’s map out all the ways interstate conflict is gonna manifest—all the things that we think that states are gonna do to try to extend their abortion bans across their borders to patients, to providers, and the like,” Rebouché told me. “It can’t be that the end goal is just to ban abortion in a state. The end goal has to be to ban abortion everywhere.”

The point is that Alito’s timeline is wrong. Shield laws were not a response to Dobbs itself; they were a response to Republicans’ threats to extend their bans on abortion beyond their own borders once Roe was overturned.

“Many of the same anti-abortion politicians who were telling the Court, Hey, we should leave this to each individual state to decide its own policies—they immediately set about trying to impose their own restrictions on abortion care that was taking place legally elsewhere,” Beck said.

Shield laws are not directly at issue in Louisiana’s case. But Alito’s reference to those laws as part of a “scheme” to undermine Dobbs is a tell that he believes that New York should be compelled to help enforce Louisiana’s ban on abortion. Although the justices who overturned Roe blamed it for fomenting partisan rancor and division, the Dobbs ruling was always going to be worse in that regard, precisely because abortion cannot truly be banned as long as you can cross state lines to get one.

Perhaps the last time the country’s federalist system faced this sort of challenge was during the antebellum conflict over slavery. Contemporary shield laws pose similar legal questions to the “liberty laws” of the 19th century, which varied state by state. In 1820, Pennsylvania passed the first, making it a felony to kidnap someone for the purpose of enslaving them, whether they were born free or not. (Many slave catchers did not bother to make that distinction, as the story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped and enslaved, shows.) The centrality of slavery to both the economy and the Constitution, however, led Chief Justice Roger Taney to strike down these laws as unconstitutional in 1842. The justices concluded in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, a case involving the kidnapping of a free Black woman named Margaret Morgan, that the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause gave “the citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves as property in every State in the Union.”

Like Dobbs, however, Prigg left some loopholes through which free states could maneuver. After Prigg, some free states passed laws compelling noncooperation by state authorities with slave catchers. Incensed, and contrary to their reputation for being committed to states’ rights, supporters of slavery in Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In the 1859 case Ableman v. Booth, involving an abolitionist named Sherman Booth, who aided in breaking a former slave named Joshua Glover out of prison, the Taney Court held that any state laws interfering with the Fugitive Slave Act were unconstitutional. This imposition of pro-slavery federal power on antislavery states helped set the stage for the Civil War.

Abortion is not slavery, and abortion is unlikely to provoke another secession crisis, but anti-abortion advocates’ extraterritorial strategy has been tried before. They will keep trying to impose their will on pro-abortion-rights states, and where that does not succeed, they will demand that a sympathetic Supreme Court compel those states to submit. If that fails, they will seek to use the power of the federal government to ban or strictly limit abortion nationwide.

In his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858, Abraham Lincoln predicted that “we shall lie down, pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.” If Lincoln’s warning holds true today, then America won’t be divided between states where abortion is legal and illegal forever. Either we will become all one thing or all the other.

1.

In a moment of gloomy geopolitical news, Ukraine has become a bright spot. Kyiv is faring better on the battlefield than at any time in years. Russia’s costs are surging even as its military gains shrink. If Ukraine can sustain this trajectory, perhaps it can finally force Moscow to make a decent peace.

But the optimism should be tempered: There are nagging questions about how long this period of Ukrainian advantage will last and how dangerous a cornered Russian President Vladimir Putin could be.

Since the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023, this war has mostly had a depressing rhythm. The Russians grind away at the front, gradually grabbing land while pressing their economic and manpower advantages. The costs of that strategy have been obscene and the progress has been glacial. But the basic trend line had been clear, allowing Putin to believe that Russia would win an ugly victory in the end.

But 2026 has been different. The rate of Russian advances is slower than in prior years, even as losses remain sky-high: perhaps 35,000 personnel killed, wounded or missing each month. The Ukrainians have regained small spits of land through localized counterattacks. The momentum has shifted mostly because of Ukraine’s world-class drone capabilities.

Innovation is intense and unceasing in Ukraine: Development cycles for smaller drones have dropped from years to weeks or days. Along the front lines, pervasive drone coverage creates a kill zone for the Russians in which movement is difficult and massing is deadly. For now, that dynamic helps the defender, Ukraine, more than the attacker, Russia.

Crucially, Kyiv has added large numbers of midrange drones that can smash trains, trucks and other logistical targets 100 miles or more from the front, making it harder for Moscow to reinforce contested positions. This complements a sophisticated long-range strike program, featuring one-way drones and some domestically developed missiles.

That program put a damper on Putin’s recent Victory Day parade in Moscow, upended an economic summit in St. Petersburg, and hammered the oil infrastructure that underpins Russia’s war effort.

The Economist reports that Russian refinery output was 15% lower this spring than last spring, despite higher prices due to the American war on Iran. Russia’s monthly battlefield losses now regularly match or exceed its recruitment rates. Discontent among the Russian elite is rising; the war economy is under growing strain.

The diplomatic context is also shifting: The electoral defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in April removed Putin’s best European ally and lifted a persistent obstacle to continued European funding of Ukraine.

None of this means victory is near: Ukraine still can’t liberate large parts of its land in the east now held by Moscow. Putin is still bent on further dismembering and politically neutering that country. But if Ukraine keeps bleeding Putin’s armies and battering the Russian economy through the remainder of this year, perhaps it can exhaust even Putin’s willingness to accept such exorbitant costs.

Conditions might then emerge for a ceasefire along the present line of contact — even a tense, periodically violent peace might allow Ukraine to rebuild and integrate with the West. The prospect for that integration, too, is better than ever. Ukraine can tie itself into the Western defense-technological ecosystem by selling drone and counter-drone technology.

But pessimism often follows optimism in Ukraine; we’ve heard that the tide is turning before. Even as Ukraine’s fortunes are improving, one uncertainty and one danger persist.

The uncertainty is whether Ukraine’s drone advantage is now structural or merely cyclical. Ukraine briefly grabbed the upper hand in early 2025, only for Russia to neutralize that edge as the year went on by adapting to Ukrainian tactics — for instance, by using wide-guided drones to evade Ukrainian electronic warfare.

The Russian military remains a resilient, learning organization; Russian industry can churn out drones and other weaponry at scale. If Ukraine’s drone edge is temporary, its residual weaknesses will soon come back into focus.

The country is still short on manpower. Russian attacks savaged the Ukrainian energy grid last winter, and next winter could be more painful. Moscow has been intensifying its brutal air war against Kyiv and other cities.

The danger is that a pressured Putin will only increase his coercive efforts. The Russian leader has long argued that the conflict with Kyiv is a fight against the West. Over the years, he has used nuclear threats, murderous sabotage and aggressive hybrid warfare to keep Ukraine’s supporters off-balance.

This dimension of the war is heating up. Late last month, a Russian drone struck an apartment building in Romania, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member. Russian threats against vulnerable Baltic states have grown more menacing.

Putin isn’t preparing for World War III: His military can hardly handle the fight it’s in. But he probably hopes that military intimidation will cause European states to attenuate their support for Ukraine or discourage it from striking Russian cities. Or perhaps he believes that the threat of escalation will bring a favorable diplomatic intervention from US President Donald Trump. Some NATO officials even fear that Putin might stage a minor military conflict — an occupation and then a quick withdrawal from territory in Estonia, for example — as a way of discrediting NATO and showing the Europeans that Trump no longer has their back.

That’s still an outlier scenario. But Putin, who has staked everything in Ukraine, won’t easily accept bitter disappointment there. A conflict that is now going better for the good guys could become more dangerous before it ends.