All three judges spent much of the hearing pressing Louisiana on a narrower question first: whether the state has legal standing to bring the challenge at all. No ruling came down Wednesday, and the panel set no timeline for one. Mail-order mifepristone remains available nationwide for now while the court considers the case, and whichever side loses at the Fifth Circuit is widely expected to ask the Supreme Court to take it up again.
Joined to Louisiana's case is Rosalie Markezich, a Louisiana woman represented by attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom. Markezich says that in 2023 her then-boyfriend used her email address, without her knowledge, to order abortion pills by mail from Dr. Remy Coeytaux, a California physician, and had her forward Coeytaux $150 to pay for them. She says she never chose to take the drugs and has intervened in the case to argue that the FDA's mail-order rule made what happened to her possible. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) has argued that the same rule lets mail-order pills cross into states like Louisiana that have written their own restrictions on abortion into law.
The case carries a history. In May, the Fifth Circuit sided with Louisiana and ordered the FDA to restore its in-person dispensing rule while the appeal continued. The Supreme Court quickly paused that order, and the pills have kept moving by mail ever since. Wednesday's arguments were another round in a fight that has already reached the nation's highest court once and appears headed there again.
A Body Used Without a Choice
Set the legal questions aside for a moment, because underneath the docket number is a woman who says her body was used against her will by someone she trusted, and a package that arrived at her door carrying a decision she never made. That is not an abstraction. That is the oldest wound there is — one person's will forced onto another person's body, dressed up in whatever modern packaging the age provides.
Scripture calls this bondage by its right name, and it calls something else the answer. Not a new law. Not a better regulation. A liberty that Christ himself purchased and handed over.
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." (Galatians 5:1)
That liberty cuts two directions, and a courthouse cannot supply either one. It means no man, no boyfriend, no clinic, and no mail-order package gets to make the choice that belongs to a woman alone before God. And it means the little life riding along inside her was never a problem to be solved by force or by silence — he was known before the package ever shipped.
"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (Psalm 139:14)
My friend, the courts will keep arguing about standing and statutes, and that argument matters — laws either protect the vulnerable or they don't. But no ruling from New Orleans, and no ruling from Washington after it, reaches down into the coercion itself, into the fear and the pressure and the lie that says a woman's body is available for someone else's convenience. Only the gospel reaches that far. Christ did not die to hand you a better regulation. He died to break the yoke off your neck entirely, and to call the child you carry exactly what heaven calls him: known, formed, and wanted.