Evening, Meteor readers,

It was a brilliant weekend for basketball but not so brilliant for my bracket. Congratulations to this week’s top three participants in the Meteor’s March Madness bracket challenge: Marsha, Em, and my husband.

In today’s newsletter, Samhita Mukhopadhyay speaks to Dr. Beverly Winikoff and Dr. Lisa Haddad of the Population Council, a research nonprofit with a special relationship to the Supreme Court’s mifepristone case—oral arguments for which were heard today.  Plus we congratulate a history-making Englishwoman and check in on Diddy.

Crossing my fingers for The Sweet 16,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Yesterday, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for a “lasting” ceasefire in Gaza—but really only lasting until the end of Ramadan (which is over in two weeks). The vote on the resolution was nearly unanimous, with the United States choosing to abstain. The resolution also calls for the release of all hostages and access to humanitarian aid for the thousands of civilians currently facing famine in Gaza.

• Over the weekend, Homeland Security raided homes in Miami and Los Angeles linked to Sean Diddy Combs and his company Bad Boy Films Production. Law enforcement has not announced the exact reason for the raids, but they are part of a sweeping sex trafficking inquiry. There are currently several active lawsuits against Combs and his associates, including allegations of rape and sexual assault.

• A bridge in Baltimore collapsed Tuesday morning after one of its supports was hit by a passing cargo ship. Two people were rescued from the wreckage and search parties were deployed for any remaining survivors. Bridge experts say they’re “unsurprised” by the bridge’s destruction.

• The Utah women’s basketball team, who until last night were competing in the NCAA Tournament, experienced what Coach Lynne Roberts described as a “series of racial hate crimes” while in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. As the team was entering a restaurant a man in a truck revved his engine to frighten them, and shouted the N-word. The incident happened again as the team was leaving, this time with more strangers in more vehicles repeating the racial slur. The NCAA worked to find the Utes a new hotel for their safety, but the school’s athletic director made the point that the team never should have been in Idaho in the first place. Why were they there? Because hotels in Spokane, Washington, where the early rounds of the tournament are taking place, had been filled to capacity by teams and support staff playing in the men’s tournament, along with a youth volleyball tournament.

• On Friday, British ultramarathoner Jasmin Paris became the first woman ever to complete the Barkley Marathons, which, if you don’t know, is a mysterious and grueling race through steep terrain that participants are given 60 hours to complete. Paris finished the race with only a minute and 30 seconds left on the clock.

TODAY AT SCOTUS

The Abortion Pill on Trial

One of its key researchers says Mifepristone was tested “with three times or more rigor” than other drugs.

BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY

ACTIVISTS OUTSIDE OF THE SUPREME COURT LAST SPRING IN SUPPORT OF THE ABORTION PILL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the first abortion case to come before the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade. The case, brought by the extremist group Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), is challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—specifically the FDA’s 2016-2021 policies, which expanded access to the safe and effective abortion drug mifepristone, initially approved in 2000 and now the most common abortion method across the country. AHM’s main argument? That the FDA did not adequately study mifepristone’s safety risks. (We explain it more in-depth here.)

The implications of this decision could be disastrous. As Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO at the National Women’s Law Center, told us, “Banning mifepristone would upend abortion care not just in the conservative states that have been racing to ban it—but in all 50 states, no matter their laws.”

But the case itself is farfetched, argues Dr. Lisa Haddad, the medical director for the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research, the nonprofit research center that led clinical testing on mifepristone more than two decades ago. In fact, she points out, over 5 million people have successfully used it since then.

With the case now before the court, we spoke to Dr. Haddad and Dr. Beverly Winikoff, who worked at the Population Council for 25 years, where she was Program Director for Reproductive Health and Senior Medical Associate at the Council, which was the team that led clinical trials on mifepristone overseas. Now she serves as president of Gynuity Health Projects.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: You worked with the organization that facilitated the FDA approval of mifepristone—what are you feeling right now?

Dr. Beverly Winikoff: I feel like I’m charging into the skirmish. I’m getting girded up. Can’t these people ever go away? But it is very, very encouraging to see how everyday people understand that this is a highly political, not a scientific discussion.

Dr. Lisa Haddad: I feel very frustrated and a little bit beaten up. And while I’m inspired by some of the voices speaking up in support of mifepristone, I see this trend in reducing access for women, and I’m scared that the science and the excellent evidence that supports this as a way to improve health outcomes will be overlooked and minimized. It’s a slippery slope.

BW: I think in the end, it’ll be okay because of the politics—the FDA is there to do a job, and it has always done it quite well in protecting the public. And this is an attack on the FDA. When you look at it that way, there are many people who are on our side, including big pharma—because if this happens, they have no [incentive] to be able to put money into new drugs because somebody could come up and decide that they don’t like that drug and they can [sue to] override the FDA, and that would be chaotic in the pharmaceutical world. It’s not just abortion; it’s every drug that gets approved. I think the politics of it is much bigger than abortion.

That’s a good point. Can you walk us through what we need to know about the FDA approval of mifepristone? Was it the standard approval process or was it a long, hard-fought win?

BW: It was cover-your-ass time the whole way along by the FDA. That was it. That was the theme. So, every single thing was done with three times or more rigor than any other drug I’ve ever heard of. But that’s okay because the drug is very good and very safe. We also got the FDA staff to be very excited about it. People were really very interested in making sure it got through.

When we did the final studies, we had several thousand people, and it performed very, very well. We were very attached to this product because it seemed safer and more effective than you could expect. So people were very excited about it because it had the potential to be a workaround for some of the political stuff of having to go to a clinic. You were doing it at home.

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