WASHINGTON — Responding to questions from the United States Supreme Court, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a 2011 state law violated the Constitution by effectively banning all medicinal, nonsurgical abortions. The case, already accepted for review by the United States Supreme Court, may be decided this term.
The court has not decided a major abortion case since 2007, when it upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
The new case, Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, No. 12-1094, concerns a state law that restricted the use of abortion-inducing drugs to a protocol approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency in 2000 approved the use of mifepristone, sometimes called RU-486, to induce abortions in combination with a second drug.
Since then, the state court said Tuesday in an unsigned opinion, additional research has refined the proper use of mifepristone, calling for a lower dose, fewer visits to clinics and use later in the pregnancy. “Ninety-six percent of medication abortions in the United States are now provided according to a regimen different from the one described in mifepristone’s F.D.A.-approved label,” the court said.
An Oklahoma trial judge struck down the law last year, saying that it was “so completely at odds with the standard that governs the practice of medicine that it can serve no purpose other than to prevent women from obtaining abortions and to punish and discriminate against those women who do.”
In December, the State Supreme Court affirmed the trial judge’s decision, but its decision was brief and cryptic.
Even as the United States Supreme Court agreed in June to hear the state’s appeal, it asked for clarification from the State Supreme Court. In essence, the justices wanted to know what the state law meant.
Did it merely require adherence to the F.D.A.-approved protocol for mifepristone? Or did it do more?
The State Supreme Court on Tuesday gave the broader answer, saying the law “effectively bans all medication abortions.” It rested its decision in large part on language in the state law that it said applied not just to mifepristone but also to misoprostol, a second drug used in combination with it.
E. Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said the court had now twice gone astray. “The Oklahoma Supreme Court erred in striking down the law,” he said in a statement. “We believe they have erred yet again by interpreting the law more broadly than the Legislature intended.”
The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s interpretation of the state law is authoritative. But its answer could make the case less attractive to the United States Supreme Court, which may have wanted to consider only the narrower issue of whether states may require adherence to the F.D.A. protocol for mifepristone.
Having learned that the state law does more than that, the justices may decide to dismiss the case and await another one presenting the narrower question. If they do, they may not have to wait for long.
On Monday, a federal judge largely sustained part of a Texas law that tied the use of mifepristone to aspects of the agency’s protocol.