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On Friday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state of Louisiana in its lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration and barred the use of mifepristone in telemedicine nationwide, throwing the country’s abortion provision and abortion laws—not to mention the authority of the FDA to regulate food and drugs—into chaos. The ruling would be the biggest blow to abortion rights since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade (as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey) and stripped the constitutional right to abortion from American women. But on Monday, the Supreme Court reversed the 5th Circuit, allowing telehealth abortions with mifepristone again, at least until the justices can fully weigh in on the matter.

This kind of legal whiplash is the new normal when it comes to abortion rights.

When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs in 2022, the majority opinion claimed that Roe had “sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half century,” and that, “far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.” A better solution, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, was to send the question back to state legislatures: “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” the opinion declares, before quoting a previous dissent from deceased Justice Antonin Scalia arguing that abortion laws “are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”

This is not what happened: Overturning Roe didn’t resolve a contentious national argument and bring about an era of considered debate followed by a democratic process to set abortion laws that reflect public opinion; it just made abortion rights far more fragile, including in the liberal states that seek to protect them. Instead of turning the issue back to the states, abortion opponents are now focused on ending abortion access nationwide. Instead of providing clarity, the courts have created chaos.

The moment the Dobbs decision came down, many conservative states banned abortion thanks to trigger laws passed years earlier that had gone into effect with the demise of Roe. In states with trigger laws, abortion providers who knew that a decision was looming worked overtime to complete procedures and scrambled to hand women pills. When the decision finally hit, waiting rooms full of patients were suddenly told that their appointments were canceled. Chaos and confusion reigned—and continue to reign, as women in states that ban abortion still seek the procedure, with many not knowing that it’s been outlawed. Women who never thought abortion bans would affect their lives have suddenly realized that those bans also limit how doctors can treat miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other complications, meaning that a pregnant woman in medical distress can get a full range of care in California but may wind up losing her uterus in Texas. It’s not just abortion laws that are patchworked across the country; basic care for pregnant women is........

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