President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice wants to dismiss a legal challenge against a common abortion medication brought by Missouri and Kansas, pitting top Republican officials in the two states against the Trump administration.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, along with Idaho’s attorney general, are asking a federal court in Texas to reimpose national restrictions on mifepristone that could make it more difficult for women to use the drug. Mifepristone, when used in combination with another drug, is one of the most common methods of abortion early in pregnancy.

Department of Justice lawyers on Monday evening said in a court filing that the lawsuit should be dismissed or transferred to another court. The closely watched filing marked the first time the DOJ has weighed in on Kansas and Missouri’s challenge in a major way since Trump took office.

The DOJ’s position places Kobach and Bailey, both staunch abortion opponents, in an uncomfortable position. They can either accede to the department’s request at the risk of appearing to back off a major fight over abortion, or fight the Trump administration and potentially anger the president.

But the DOJ appears to be trying to find a way out for Trump and the Republican state attorneys general. While the department wants the lawsuit dismissed, it’s limiting its arguments to procedural issues and largely avoiding taking a direct stance on mifepristone. The DOJ argues the states’ challenges were filed either too late or in the wrong court.

“Regardless of the merits of the States’ claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court,” the DOJ filing says.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California-Davis who closely follows legal fights over abortion access, said the filing signals Trump wanting the case to “go away” without taking a clear position on mifepristone.

“It is weird and it creates tensions when you have the Trump administration fighting conservative attorneys general like Andrew Bailey. At the same time, I don’t think you want to read it as Trump is defending mifepristone,” Ziegler said. “The kind of topline is the Trump administration is fighting for its right not to have to deal with this right now.”

The Republican-led states filed a complaint earlier in October to prohibit mifepristone’s use after seven weeks of pregnancy instead of 10 and require three in-person doctor visits. The request would reinstate requirements that were in effect before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxed them in 2016 and 2021.

The complaint, filed against the FDA, came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that a group of doctors couldn’t sue to ban the drug, upholding nationwide access to the drug. But Missouri and Kansas were allowed to intervene in the lawsuit, empowering the Republican-led states to keep the legal challenge alive.

Medical experts say serious complications from pill abortions are exceedingly rare. Significant infection, excessive blood loss and hospitalization occur in less than 0.32% of patients, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in its own legal brief.

On social media, Bailey wrote that that evidence establishes that mifepristone poses a “grave risk” to women’s health “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Regardless of which venue is proper for a lawsuit, Missouri will always fight to protect the health and safety of women and demand the FDA acknowledge the data and reinstate critical regulations to prevent the needless loss of human life,” Bailey wrote.

Kobach’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has long sought to court abortion opponents and has emphasized that his appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court helped make possible the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the federal right to an abortion. But his allies also rewrote the Republican Party platform in ways that angered some anti-abortion activists and he has voiced support for state-level decisions about abortion access.

Kobach and Bailey have been more vocal in their opposition to abortion, though voters in both states have affirmed support for abortion access.

Kansas, in August 2022, became the first state following Dobbs where voters affirmed the state Supreme Court’s interpretation that the Kansas Constitution protects the right to end a pregnancy. Missouri voters in November narrowly passed Amendment 3, which overturned the state’s abortion ban and enshrined abortion rights into the Missouri Constitution.

“This just shows how egregious Attorney General Bailey’s attack on mifepristone was to begin with, that even the Trump administration was ready to toss it out because they knew it had no legs to stand on,” Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, said in a statement.

“That said, while we’re clear we can’t trust this administration to make evidence-based decisions, we are on board with actions that expose Andrew Bailey’s disgusting obsession with women’s bodies -- particularly young women’s.”

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—The Star’s Kacen Bayless contributed to this story.

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