Four of the 9 justices who heard Tuesday’s extremely anticipated Supreme Court oral arguments on a problem to a key abortion drug are ladies, the very best quantity ever to sit down on the excessive court docket for an abortion case. All three attorneys who argued the case, on each side, are additionally ladies, a relative rarity within the male-dominated Supreme Court bar.

The end result gave the impression to be strikingly candid, particular and non-euphemistic exchanges about ladies’s well being, highlighting the excessive court docket’s altering gender ratio.

Justices Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor strongly dissented when the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, whereas Barrett was within the majority. But Jackson was not but on the court docket on the time of that ruling.

The abortion tablet case — which might limit entry to mifepristone, a medicine utilized in 63 p.c of the greater than 1 million abortions carried out yearly within the United States — is targeted on considerably technical medical points.

Antiabortion advocates argue the tablets are extremely harmful, particularly when taken with out an ultrasound or in-person medical go to — false claims primarily based largely on research which have since been retracted by the journal that revealed them. Leading medical associations stress that the treatment is extraordinarily secure, with critical hostile occasions occurring in fewer than 0.5 p.c of instances.

Ahead of the arguments, specialists questioned how a lot the justices — authorized, not medical specialists — would interact with the health- and safety-related arguments made by each side within the case. Some anticipated that the justices would keep away from the deserves of the case, solely discussing problems with whether or not the plaintiffs had standing to sue over the tablets.

On Tuesday, the justices “were really interested in the nitty-gritty,” mentioned Mary Ziegler, a legislation professor on the University of California at Davis who makes a speciality of abortion.

“They were trying to take this seriously and treat abortion pills in this context as a medical issue,” Ziegler mentioned. “The kind of case this is — it kind of invites that. It’s not a case about the Constitution.”

While the vast majority of the dialogue on Tuesday centered on the standing points, the justices — particularly the ladies — embraced alternatives to debate the medical realities of the tablets of their questions, sometimes even providing commentary of their very own.

In one alternate about whether or not one of many physician plaintiffs had standing within the case, Barrett drew a distinction between a process to filter out the uterus, often known as dilation and curettage (or D&C), when it’s carried out after a miscarriage and when it’s carried out after an abortion.

“The fact that she performed a D&C does not necessarily mean that there was a living embryo or fetus,” Barrett mentioned, referring to Christina Francis, an OB/GYN who’s the chief govt of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a plaintiff within the case. “Because you can have a D&C after, you know, a miscarriage.”

Soon after this, Kagan and Jackson joined in to again up Barrett — echoing her considerations about standing. At instances, the three ladies even completed each other’s traces of questioning.

“Can you clarify the broader conscience harm from the narrow one?” Jackson requested Erin Hawley, the lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the antiabortion group that introduced the case. “Because I had understood the conscience harm as Justice Barrett does, but you suggest that there’s a broader one.”

Barrett additionally engaged in an in-depth dialogue of whether or not an ultrasound ought to be required for a drugs abortion. She went on to query the lawyer for the Justice Department, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, about ectopic pregnancies, a extremely harmful situation during which a being pregnant implants outdoors of the uterus — asking the way it was potential “to detect an ectopic pregnancy without an ultrasound.”

Prelogar provided a extremely particular reply that highlighted the lawyer’s grasp of the medical details at concern.

“There’s a set of screening questions that are often deployed,” she mentioned.

“You can ask things like, ‘Do you have unilateral pelvic pain?’ ‘Did you become pregnant while you had an IUD in or after a tubal ligation?’” she continued, explaining the ins and outs of the problem.