BOISE, Idaho — A factually baseless effort to have the courts force the Food and Drug Administration to make mifepristone harder to obtain — that is, to have the courts legislate national abortion policy — was relaunched on your dime in October.

The case, originally filed by a small group of doctors opposed to abortion rights, who were represented by the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom — to which Attorney General Raúl Labrador has signed over your interests — tried to force the FDA to restrict access to the drug. The poorly crafted lawsuit was unanimously thrown out by the supermajority conservative U.S. Supreme Court because none of the doctors could demonstrate that they were in any way harmed by the FDA’s decision.

None of them were required to give out or prescribe mifepristone. They simply wanted the court to write new laws.

Now Labrador, along with the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Kansas, has attempted to revive the suit in your name. If the doctors haven’t been harmed, he argues, the state of Idaho surely has. So Idaho and a few other states could take up this case where the anti-abortion doctors lacked standing.

The arguments made in favor of that case range from hilariously ludicrous to deeply disingenuous.

Take this one, citing a study noting that women aged 15-19 have not had the same spike in birth rates that state-level abortion bans caused in other age groups.

“The study thus concludes that ‘one explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions.’ This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs … is depressing expected birth rates for teenage mothers.”

And here’s why that supposedly hurts Idaho:

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States (sic) subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds.’”

Let’s put this in layman’s terms. What Labrador’s filing argues, in effect, is that Idaho might be suffering a too-low rate of teenage births, which is in turn depriving Idaho of the federal welfare payments it might otherwise enjoy.

Wow.

Just, wow.

The suit repeatedly argues that Idaho is harmed because it is having to treat more cases of complications following mifepristone use as its use has become more widespread.

Well, sure. And the number of complications associated with the use of any medication will rise as use of that medication becomes more common. It’s very hard to experience side effects from a pill you aren’t taking, after all.

But should aspirin be taken off the market because it sometimes has side effects? Obviously not.

The proper question with any medication is: Do the expected benefits outweigh the risks?

Is mifepristone presenting a danger to women’s health? It seems nearly every major women’s health care organization and organization representing doctors in the country filed an amicus brief opposing this argument, from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, to the American Psychological Association, to the American Medical Association.

But, as with his recent effort to bully the American Academy of Pediatrics into changing its treatment recommendations based on ideology, Labrador wants us to believe that he and his holy roller litigators know better than medical professionals.

Perhaps the worst instance of this came from Labrador’s spokesman, who “noted that a Georgia woman recently died ‘from complications after taking mifepristone,’” as the Statesman reported.

Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, wasn’t killed by mifepristone.

As ProPublica reported, she traveled from her home in Georgia, where abortion is banned after six weeks, to North Carolina, where she received mifepristone. She had a rare but treatable complication: She didn’t expel all of the fetal tissue. The standard treatment is dilation and curettage, also a common method used in surgical abortion.

The procedure was legal under Georgia’s law under Thurman’s circumstances, but doctors aren’t lawyers. The penalty for violating Georgia’s abortion law is up to 10 years imprisonment. Doctors delayed treatment for 20 hours, which a panel of state experts blamed for her death.

So Thurman died because of Georgia’s draconian abortion laws, which forced her to leave the state for medication, and which delayed her treatment for a rare, treatable complication.

The same thing will happen in Idaho, which has much stricter abortion laws, sooner or later. That harm to Idaho cannot be prevented by banning mifepristone. It can only be prevented by repealing the state’s abortion ban, which Labrador has fought tooth-and-nail (though with little success) to preserve in all cases, even when it places women’s health and future fertility at risk.

Because medical injury to women is not the outcome Labrador and the far right wants to prevent.

What he wants to prevent is women having a degree of reproductive freedom — anywhere in the country.

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Bryan Clark is an Idaho Statesman opinion writer based in eastern Idaho.

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