I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

Are you new here? Get free emails to your inbox daily. Would you rather listen? You can find our podcast here.

Today’s read: 15 minutes.

Do Americans see each other as immoral?

Back in March, the headline was everywhere: “Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad,” the title of a 25-country study from the Pew Research Center. Associate Editor Lindsey Knuth interviewed one of the study’s coauthors, Jonathan Evans, and Pew’s associate director of global attitudes research, Laura Silver, to talk about Americans’ national pride, partisan differences, and the state of professional polling. You can listen to the interview here.

Quick hits.

1. Indiana held primary elections for the 2026 midterms, and at least five of seven Republican state senators who opposed an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map were defeated by challengers backed by President Donald Trump. One other race is too close to call. (The primary) Separately, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy won the Republican nomination for Ohio’s gubernatorial election. He will face former Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton in the general election. (The results)
2. President Trump announced he is suspending a U.S. military operation to assist ships in their passage through the Strait of Hormuz, saying the pause will allow for renewed discussions over a potential peace agreement with Iran. (The announcement)
3. The Spanish government said it will accept a cruise ship experiencing a hantavirus outbreak, which has killed three people on board and infected at least three others. The ship was previously denied entry by the African island nation of Cabo Verde but will now travel to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago, to receive assistance. (The latest)
4. Russia carried out strikes across eastern Ukraine, killing at least 27 people. The attacks came hours before the deadline expired for a Ukraine-proposed ceasefire. (The strikes)
5. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly blocked the publication of studies conducted by agency scientists that supported the safety of vaccines for Covid-19 and shingles. An FDA spokesperson said the scientists drew overly broad conclusions that were not supported by data. (The report)

Today’s topic.

The Supreme Court and mifepristone. On Monday, May 4, the Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on a lower court’s order that mifepristone, a drug commonly used in early-term abortions, can only be prescribed and dispensed in person. The order pauses the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’s decision to prevent the drug from being accessed by mail. In a brief order, Justice Samuel Alito, who oversees appeals from the 5th Circuit, paused that court’s order until May 11, restoring telehealth access to the drug and giving challengers until May 7 to respond.

Mifepristone is a drug taken to treat hormone disorders, manage miscarriages, and chemically induce abortions (in combination with misoprostol). From 2000 to 2022, more than 6 million patients in the U.S. used mifepristone, and 63% of U.S. abortions in 2023 were medication abortions. Today, roughly a quarter of abortions are provided through telehealth prescriptions. As of 2024, the FDA reported 36 deaths of patients using the drug since 2000.

Back up: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has relaxed restrictions on mifepristone several times since its approval. In 2016, the FDA deemed mifepristone safe to use to terminate pregnancies up to ten weeks and in 2021 removed a requirement that it be prescribed in person. Finally, in 2023, the agency finalized rules allowing for drugs used in abortions to be accessed by mail. Pro-life medical groups and doctors challenged the 2016 and 2021 rulings, and the Supreme Court unanimously rejected that challenge in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in June 2024, saying they did not have standing to sue. 

Then what? In October 2025, Louisiana sued the FDA, arguing its policy of allowing mifepristone to be delivered by mail was unsafe for women and allowed abortion to continue in Louisiana despite a statewide ban. On May 1, the 5th Circuit sided with Louisiana. Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, two manufacturers of the drug, challenged that decision on May 2, arguing that Louisiana did not have standing to sue; Justice Alito issued the temporary pause two days later.  

The Supreme Court’s order is not a final decision in the case. After the challengers respond, the Court will decide whether to let the circuit court’s decision stand, take up the case itself, or extend the stay while it considers the arguments. The Supreme Court will decide how to proceed before the stay is lifted on May 11.

We’ll get into what the left and right are saying about this case. Then, Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead gives her take.

What the left is saying.

• Many on the left suggest mifepristone could create a political crisis for Trump. 
• Some believe the case is part of a national effort to restrict abortion access.
• Others say the Supreme Court is to blame for the uncertainty over mifepristone. 

In MS NOW, Mary Ziegler suggested “the mifepristone ruling could bring Trump’s high-wire act on abortion crashing down.”

“In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump largely neutralized the abortion issue by simultaneously claiming credit for the end of Roe and suggesting that if he was returned to the presidency, each state could continue to set its own abortion policy,” Ziegler said. “After he was elected, anti-abortion groups rolled out a ‘Make America Pro-Life Again’ wish list, much of it focused on eliminating access to mifepristone. The Trump White House mostly ignored these demands, acutely aware of polls showing that most Americans opposed sweeping criminal laws and favored access to mifepristone.”

“This equilibrium has worked for the president and the GOP, but changes to the broader landscape made it increasingly untenable in the long term. While Trump has continued picking judges with strong anti-abortion credentials, social conservatives have grown tired of waiting for the president,” Ziegler wrote. “The 5th Circuit ruling could bring Republicans’ high-wire act crashing down… [Trump] is trapped between increasingly angry social conservatives and an electorate broadly approving of abortion rights and access. The 5th Circuit’s ruling could harm an already wounded Republican Party.”

In The Hill, Nikki Sapiro Vinckier said “an abortion ban won’t happen all at once — mifepristone is just the next phase.”

“In Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court signaled that even when courts step in, they may not be able to block these kinds of restrictions nationwide. That means access may increasingly depend on where you live and whether a specific challenge has been brought in your state. So even when access is restored, it is fragile, temporary and inconsistent,” Vinckier wrote. “At the same time, pressure is building from every direction. Federal lawmakers are introducing legislation aimed at revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone entirely. Advocacy groups are pushing agencies to revisit decades of settled science.”

“The result is not one clear moment where abortion becomes illegal everywhere, but a series of decisions that slowly reshape access. The care is still technically available, but the path to get it becomes more difficult, more confusing and less reliable,” Vinckier said. “Banning medication abortion outright is deeply unpopular… Anti-abortion extremists think they can change access quietly without people noticing, without having to own it.”

In Slate, Jill Filipovic wrote “abortion access is in chaos. Blame the Supreme Court.”

“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,” Filipovic said. “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 provision of mifepristone via telemedicine is… at the core of this most recent legal about-face that led the Supreme Court to temporarily allow telemedicine abortion to continue. But the court… did not say that telemedicine abortion is legal, case closed. It has just acquiesced to the status quo until it can decide,” Filipovic wrote. “In the meantime, the anti-abortion movement has pressured the Trump administration into forcing an FDA review of mifepristone, the results of which are supposed to come late this year. The movement’s great hope is that the FDA will revoke the drug’s approval entirely. And so women and their doctors remain in limbo.”

What the right is saying.

• The right supports restricting mifepristone because of its medical risks. 
• Some expect the 5th Circuit’s ruling to eventually win out.
• Others say the FDA must complete a thorough review of mifepristone.

In The Wall Street Journal, Sierra Dawn McClain called mifepristone “a tool of coercion.”

“The Fifth Circuit’s order has a sound basis. Mifepristone… poses clinical risks and is a potential tool of coercion and abuse. Its distribution without safeguards heightens these dangers,” McClain said. “An in-person doctor’s visit is the only reliable way to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy — a life-threatening condition in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. Because the symptoms of a chemical abortion (abdominal pain and uterine bleeding) can be similar to those of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, a woman who doesn’t get an ultrasound or physical exam may mistake an emergency for a normal drug side effect.”

“Pro-abortion groups say they champion women’s rights, yet they promote a policy that endangers women,” McClain wrote. “The Fifth Circuit’s order is a necessary corrective to the FDA’s failures. The agency should use this pause as an opportunity to reinstate permanently in-person dispensing and physician-led follow-up visits, which are necessary to protect women’s health and freedom.”

In Hot Air, Ed Morrissey explored the Supreme Court’s “stay” in the case. 

“The Fifth Circuit shut [the requirement for medical supervision] down three years ago, but the Supreme Court overruled it on the basis of standing. The panel attempted to address that challenge in anticipation of another appeal,” Morrissey said. “This puts the new ruling on solid ground for standing, not to mention the FDA's acknowledgment of the use of incomplete data for its 2021 [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS)]. Since the 2023 reversal, the state of Louisiana can also point to specific financial losses due to the 2021 REMS and the likelihood that those costs will increase in the future as more misuses occur.”

“It makes sense to suspend the impact of the Fifth Circuit ruling for a brief period while hashing this out, but if Alito thought the court would just follow suit from their earlier ruling, he would have referred the case to the full court for cert, along with a more substantive injunction against the ruling,” Morrissey wrote. “This looks more like a quick way to reverse the previous ruling on standing, allowing the ruling to take full effect while Danco and GenBioPro pursue an appeal the hard way.”

In National Review, Dan McLaughlin made “the case for staying the FDA rule on the abortion pill.”

“The stay request that has advanced through the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court doesn’t ask those courts to ban the pill entirely from the market but simply to restore the pre-2023 rules for dispensing it, which required a single, in-person doctor visit,” McLaughlin said. “The case isn’t brought by doctors, so it doesn’t have the same standing-to-sue issues that doomed a similar challenge in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (2024). Louisiana has laws against using the pill to commit homicide against an unborn child, and allowing the pill to be mailed into the state without the participation of a Louisiana-licensed doctor undermines its ability to enforce that unquestionably constitutional law.”

“[The 5th Circuit] found — unsurprisingly, given the lack of studies and the fact that the current FDA isn’t even defending the rule — that Louisiana is likely to win its suit on the merits. That’s always the most important factor, in practice, to granting an injunction, stay, temporary restraining order, or other emergency relief,” McLaughlin wrote. “Louisiana isn’t asking to stop the FDA from asking the right questions, or from answering them. It’s just asking the courts to tell the agency to stop acting as if it has the answers before it even starts asking the questions.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• I don’t think the FDA ever presented significant evidence to justify remote mifepristone prescriptions.
• At the same time, I doubt the Supreme Court is going to unilaterally overturn the agency’s rules.
• Trump won’t change those rules, either, and the pro-life movement needs to adjust to this administration.

Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead: Let’s rip the bias band-aid off: My most strongly held political conviction is my commitment to a pro-life ethic. Most of my political convictions are downstream of my belief that the preservation of human life is the single greatest goal of a secular government, and chief among those convictions is my view that abortion and physician-assisted suicide are the most pressing moral injustices in the United States today. The only non-Tangle political work I’ve ever done is pro-life volunteering. 

With that said, I celebrated the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision for two reasons: First, and most pressingly, the Court acknowledged that abortion is not a federal constitutional right. Second, it asserted that states had the right to regulate abortion. Opinions on abortion vary across the country because the interest in preserving children’s lives and the interest in women’s autonomy and security are in tension, and our constitutional system was designed to allow the states to represent that variance in how they govern themselves. Therefore, the state-by-state variance in the current map of abortion access across the country is constitutionally necessary.

Mail-order access to mifepristone and misoprostol, however, throws a wrench into the state-level gears — a wrench that staunchly pro-life states are trying to remove through legal appeals. 

In 2023, the FDA changed its Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) policy to remove the in-person visit requirement to access abortion drugs. That meant, in practice, that people in pro-life states gained the ability to order the drugs online from pro-choice states, where doctors aren’t subject to restrictions on providing abortions. Additionally, several pro-choice states have enacted “shield laws” that protect in-state medical providers from out-of-state civil and criminal enforcement. Pro-life states have challenged those shield laws by attempting to charge doctors in pro-choice states, but so far those challenges have failed.

I have a few concerns with the FDA’s REMS revision regarding mifepristone and misoprostol. For one, the FDA ordered the change without significant new evidence suggesting further assurance of the drugs’ safety. The last significant review of mifepristone occurred in the early 2010s, and it resulted in no change to the in-person visit protocol out of an abundance of caution. The FDA temporarily allowed practitioners to bypass that requirement during the pandemic, but when it completely removed the in-person rule following the Dobbs decision in 2023, it didn’t seem to conduct a completely independent review. The agency only began a totally new internal review of the drug in 2025, and that review is ongoing. 

The FDA cited international evidence as part of its reasoning for relaxing the REMS. But I think the FDA was motivated more by changing state policies in the wake of Dobbs, and I’m alarmed that it made this decision without conducting further review on its own. No matter which direction it comes from, that sort of federal agency politicization is not good for a few reasons — it reduces trust in the agencies themselves, and in this case, it undermines the states’ ability to enforce their laws.

Answering whether mifepristone and misoprostol legitimately deserve the relaxed REMS is complicated by the researchers’ biased proclivities or by the data itself. For example, the most significant studies on the topic include a 2013 review of Planned Parenthood’s agency-reported data on adverse events following mifepristone use; that data found a 0.65% rate of significant adverse events, which would support relaxation of the FDA rules. But one of the authors of the paper was Planned Parenthood’s medical director, the study defined “significant adverse events” without including things like incomplete abortions, and some pro-life scholars have issued a study challenging Planned Parenthood’s numbers using FDA data obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests (pro-choice organizations disputed the results of this study).

On the other side, pro-life think tanks have funded their own controversial research into the topic. The most recent such review, conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found that the FDA underestimates the dangers of the drugs; however, their research was not peer-reviewed. In a prominent controversy, a series of papers published by pro-life researchers purporting to show increased health risks of mifepristone was retracted by the publishing journal in 2024 following concerns about methodology and conflict of interest (which the pro-life authors disputed).  

Some studies carried out overseas indicate that mifepristone is generally safe, though it might need to be treated with caution. One UK study of telemedicine access to mifepristone and misoprostol found no significant safety issues from the drug. But a 2009 Finnish study found that medication abortions had a higher incidence of adverse events than surgical abortion, using a wider definition of adverse events than the 2013 Planned Parenthood study. Much of the differences between various reports on mifepristone come from using different definitions of serious adverse events. Not only will different people reporting their issues define adverse effects differently, but those effects may not necessarily be caused by the drug itself (that is, a causal connection between the drug and adverse symptoms is difficult to establish). And what’s more, the FDA changed its practice of collecting adverse-event data in 2016 so that prescribers only needed to report deaths after use of the drug, not other serious events, limiting our understanding of the complexity of the issue. 

While I acknowledge that some research supports the safety of this medication, I think that competing findings should at least have necessitated an in-house FDA review before the in-person restrictions were lifted. It’s possible that that review would have turned up similar results as seen in the UK, and the restrictions could have been lifted anyway — but instead, it seems like the rules were changed based on pressure from drug manufacturers and the apparent political climate.

That said, even if the medication is reviewed and deemed safe for at-home use, that practice still creates issues — problems of autonomy that should disturb pro-choice and pro-life people alike. There has been case after case after case after case after case after case after case after case of people, usually men but sometimes families, ordering the abortion pill regimen online, then tricking, coercing, or forcing their partners or children into taking them. Often, these cases can involve the improper administration of the medicine — some partners force-fed the pills beyond the 10-week gestational limit, which carries higher risk of complications. In some of those cases, the women lost their babies. In at least one case, a baby was born prematurely and has experienced developmental delays. In nearly all cases, the women experienced the many negative symptoms of taking abortion pills — nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and heavy bleeding. While some of these instances occurred while the FDA’s in-person requirement was still in place, they can occur more easily absent any in-person requirement — and they’re made especially easy by mail-order access across state lines, into states where these pills are ostensibly banned in the first place.

Ultimately, though, I’m genuinely unsure how the Supreme Court will rule on the 5th Circuit Court’s order pausing the 2023 standards update. I found Dan McLaughlin’s argument in National Review (under “What the right is saying”) somewhat convincing, that the Court could legitimately decide to ban remote access to mifepristone. Such a ruling would be consistent with the Court’s recent limitations on agency power. Even so, I think stepping in to restrict the use of a drug with agency approval is a bridge too far for this Court — especially when the president and new agency director have had ample opportunity to reverse the rule and just… haven’t.

That point actually brings me to what I think is probably the most interesting aspect of the pro-life movement at the moment: its apparent standoff with President Trump. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece reporting that major pro-life organizations and leaders are beginning to break with Trump over his refusal to do anything related to abortion at the national level. Before Trump was elected, Project 2025 raised the prospect of enforcing the Comstock Act, an 1873 law banning the mailing of abortion-producing substances. But Trump has neither done that nor restored the in-person requirement on mifepristone access. 

If you ask me, though, pro-life movement leaders fundamentally misunderstand the president — and they misunderstand how pro-life activism needs to adapt to the post-Dobbs world. I’d say President Trump is actually pretty pro-choice — he softened the abortion language in the 2024 GOP platform, which had been a party cornerstone since 1976. As a Florida voter in 2024, he only said he’d vote no on an abortion-rights ballot measure after he received backlash for appearing to support it in an interview. I don’t think President Trump was ever committed to pro-life ideals; he was willing to bring in justices who might overturn Roe, sure, but I honestly think that had more to do with politics than principles.

But once Roe was gone and abortion returned to the states, that calculus changed. National abortion bans have never been popular, and support for abortion rights (and the number of abortions) only increased after Dobbs. Trump is a savvy politician who’s tapped into populist instincts, and since he was never thoroughly committed to a pro-life ethic to begin with, he sees the writing on the wall. He’d much rather spend his political capital pursuing the agenda items he always cared about — immigration, tariffs, and his theory of foreign policy — than pursuing national pro-life legislation.

The pro-life movement has been rudderless post-Dobbs — it was designed as a national movement, not a state-level one. But now, when pro-life legislation in states like Tennessee and Texas can be compared against pro-choice laws in California and Massachusetts, the pro-life movement needs to focus on making sure that maternal outcomes in pro-life states are competitive with — or even better than — pro-choice states. 

As I said earlier, the interest of fetal life is often in direct tension with the interest of the mother’s autonomy and financial stability. As long as those interests are in tension, and as long as fetal life and consciousness are debated, the pro-life movement will never be able to impose federal, top-down, anti-abortion legislation. Likewise, the Supreme Court isn’t likely to step in and provide those rules itself. Instead, pro-life advocates should turn their focus to setting up pro-family policies that address the demand for abortion, not rigidly prohibiting the supply.

Take the survey: How do you think the Supreme Court should rule on the challenge to remote mifepristone prescriptions? Let us know.

Disagree? That's okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.

Your questions, answered.

We're skipping the reader question today to give our main story some extra space. Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

On Tuesday, Meta, which owns social media platforms Instagram and Facebook, said it will begin using artificial intelligence to scan users’ photos and videos to determine if they are underage. People 13 years old and younger are not allowed on the platforms, and Meta said the AI will look for “general themes and visual cues,” such as height and bone structure, to flag potential underage users. The system is currently operating in select countries, but Meta plans to expand its use in the near future. The announcement comes after a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection law and putting children at risk. TechCrunch has the story.

Numbers.

• 42% and 18%. The percentage of U.S. adults who consider abortion pills to be safe and unsafe, respectively, according to an October–November 2025 KFF poll. 
• 55% and 9%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they consider abortion pills to be safe and unsafe, respectively, in May 2023. 
• 31% and 68%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they support and oppose, respectively, laws that would ban the use of mifepristone or medication abortion nationwide. 
• 33% and 65%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they support and oppose, respectively, laws that would ban health care providers from mailing abortion pills to patients in states where abortion is banned. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about defunding NPR and PBS.
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was once again our Friday edition about corruption in the Trump administration.
• Nothing to do with politics: Ranking American light lagers.
• Our last survey: 1,618 readers responded to our ranked survey on Department of Homeland Security shutdown with 42% saying the shutdown will have significant political and operational consequences. “It will be much worse than predicted,” one respondent said. “The operational degradation will go unnoticed unless some tragic incident happens that could have been caught by an agency that had not been legislatively abused and diminished,” said another.

Have a nice day.

In March, a New Zealander became separated from her dog, Molly, after the two fell down a waterfall during a hike. The owner was rescued, but Molly remained missing. A helicopter crew equipped with thermal imaging technology located Molly a week later, lying down at the base of a waterfall. A rescuer — accompanied by support dog Bingo — was able to reach Molly and airlift her to safety. Dog and owner have since been reunited. Stuff has the story (with video of the rescue).