Page:Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (5th Cir. Apr. 12, 2023).pdf/19

 patient, my time and attention was taken away from other patients, who also need my care.”); PI App. 867 (“Because more women [who take mifepristone] are unnecessarily presenting in the emergency department, more of my time and attention is taken away from other patients who need it.”). In this way, “[t]he FDA’s actions have created a culture of chaos for emergency room physicians.” PI App. 867. And we’re capable of redressing plaintiffs’ injuries by restoring the 2000 Approval’s REMS. Accordingly, at this stage, applicants have not shown that all of the plaintiffs lack standing.

We hasten to emphasize the narrowness of this holding. We do not hold that doctors necessarily have standing to raise their patients’ claims. See. We do not hold that doctors have constitutional standing whenever they’re called upon to do their jobs. And we do not hold that doctors have standing to challenge FDA’s actions whenever the doctor sees a patient experiencing complications from an FDA-approved drug. Rather, we hold that on the record before us applicants know that hundreds of thousands of women will—with applicants’ own statistical certainty—need emergency care on account of applicants’ actions. And because applicants chose to cut out doctors from the prescription and administration of mifepristone, plaintiff doctors and their associations will necessarily be injured by the consequences. This is an exceedingly unusual regime. In fact, as far as the record before us reveals, FDA has not structured the distribution of any comparable drug in this way.

FDA’s principal contention to the contrary is that mifepristone is comparable to “ibuprofen.” FDA Stay App. 1. The theory appears to be that we cannot recognize plaintiffs’ standing here without opening a pandora’s box in which doctors have standing to litigate everything at all times, including the banalities of over-the-counter Advil.