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On Friday evening, a federal judge in Texas ruled to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone; this afternoon, the Justice Department appealed the decision. This case is about more than abortion pills: It also signals a potential new strategy for anti-abortion activists across the country.

But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The pornography paradox The problem with weather apps The ruling that threatens the future of libraries The three biggest misconceptions about Israel’s upheaval Capturing the Courts

For those keeping up with the abortion fight in America, the news of recent days has felt like watching a game of ping-pong with very serious stakes. On Friday, two federal judges released contradicting opinions on mifepristone, one of two drugs used to induce a medication abortion. Texas district-court Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA erred when it first approved mifepristone in 2000. Mere minutes later, news broke that Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State had ordered the FDA to preserve access to the medication in a suit filed by 17 states and Washington, D.C.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling, which would have blocked mifepristone access nationwide, was set to go into effect within seven days barring an appeal—but an appeal came just this afternoon from the Justice Department. The department has asked Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges to keep the Texas order on hold until the appeal is decided. However these next stages play out, it is very likely that the Supreme Court will eventually step in to adjudicate between Friday’s two conflicting federal rulings.

Beyond all of this complicated legal volleying is a simpler story: The future of abortion in America is being decided in the country’s courtrooms. As I noted in February, abortion policy is at something of a standstill in Washington; a nationwide abortion ban would have no chance of passing the majority-Democrat Senate, and there isn’t much Congress can do to restore an ironclad federal right to abortion either. But in America’s courts, the fight is escalating—and recent developments are signaling a possible new strategy for the anti-abortion movement, which consists of reinterpreting a 19th-century law to influence abortion access nationwide.

The Texas ruling “is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills,” the legal scholar Mary Ziegler explained in an article yesterday. “It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all abortions.”

The federal Comstock Act of 1873 is an anti-vice law that prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” as well as anything “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” The FDA has long followed a consensus interpretation of the Comstock Act, allowing the mailing of abortion drugs when the seller doesn’t intend for them to be used unlawfully. But reinterpreting this act would essentially ban even lawful abortion procedures. As Ziegler puts it:

No abortion method exists in the United States that does not use something “designed, adapted, or intended for abortion” and sent through the mail or via another carrier. Abortion clinics do not make their own drugs or devices; they order these items from pharmaceutical-distribution companies and medical-equipment suppliers. Taken to its logical conclusion, Kacsmaryk’s ruling means that all abortions already violate criminal law.

Abortion opponents are aware of the consequences of reinterpreting the Comstock Act, Ziegler writes—and they’re also aware that doing so “is the only realistic way to force through a national ban” in a country where strict anti-abortion policies repel a majority of voters.

“That’s because it has nothing to do with what the American people want or what the Constitution means,” Ziegler argues in her article. “Anti-abortion-rights activists have made the same bet that Judge Kacsmaryk has: They have not captured the hearts or minds of the American people, but they may have captured the courts.”

I called Ziegler today, after the Justice Department’s appeal, to get her take on what happens next. She told me that if the conflicting mifepristone rulings make their way to the Supreme Court, which they’re likely to do, it’s worth noting that the Texas decision that would block the abortion medication was “designed to appeal to these conservative justices, not just because of their views on abortion but also because they’re hostile to the administrative state”—in other words, agencies such as the EPA and the FDA.

“I don’t think you can rule anything out,” Ziegler told me. “We’re in a world where the Supreme Court is not behaving in a way we’re used to.”

Related:

The Texas abortion-pill ruling signals pro-lifers’ next push. I’m pro-life. I worry that the abortion-pill ruling could backfire. Today’s News A gunman killed four people and injured nine others at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Authorities report that the shooter, an employee at the bank, was shot to death by police on the scene. At today’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll, President Joe Biden told the Today show co-host Al Roker that he plans on running for reelection in 2024 but is not yet ready to officially announce his campaign. The U.S. State Department officially designated the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as wrongfully detained in Russia, a spokesperson announced in a statement. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on Donald Trump’s legal woes. I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on the release of her new book and the act of writing a memoir.

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Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Chen Yong / Getty; H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty

Quit Your Bucket List

By Richard A. Friedman

Years ago, just after I finished my psychiatry residency, a beloved supervisor called to say she had some bad news. At a routine checkup, she had glanced at her chest X-ray up on the viewing box while waiting for her doctor to come into the room. She was a trauma surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist and had spent years reading chest X-rays, so she knew that the coin-size lesion she saw in her lung was almost certainly cancer, given her long history of smoking.

We had dinner soon after. She was still more than two years away from the end of her life and felt physically fine—vital, even. That’s why I was so surprised when she said she had no desire to spend whatever time she had left on exotic travel or other new adventures. She wanted her husband, her friends, her family, dinner parties, and the great outdoors. “Just more Long Island sunsets. I don’t need Bali,” she told me.

Read the full article.

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“We sway this way and that / In makeshift stances / Until, in rougher water, / We doubt our sense / Of balance will ever set us / Straight again.”

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P.S.

For further reading on this moment in anti-abortion activism, I recommend my colleague Elaine Godfrey’s article ahead of the March for Life protest this past January. “Overturning Roe was only the first step. The next isn’t exactly obvious,” Elaine wrote. She spoke with different factions within the anti-abortion movement about what they believe this next step should be.

— Isabel

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The first prisoner to die was 69 years old, a wheelchair-using former printing-press operator who called himself Cap. He’d arrived at the penitentiary from Orleans Parish in the winter of 1978 with a life sentence for murder. He was overweight and suffered from a variety of health issues. As a young man, Cap had survived an accidental electrocution. As an old man, he was swiftly killed by COVID-19. He was hurriedly buried by a masked-and-gloved skeleton crew of apprehensive, incarcerated volunteers at Point Lookout, the prison cemetery.

Afterward, the world became very small. Who would be next?, we wondered. Every cough was suspect, every interaction a risk. Prisoners complained that employees were not wearing their masks; employees threatened to send prisoners to the cellblock for not wearing theirs.

The prison where I live—the Louisiana State Penitentiary, colloquially known as Angola—went quiet in those early days of death and fear. This was not a conventional opponent who could be combatted on equal footing; nor was it an abstract antagonist like “criminal justice.” This was an enemy unseen—ruthless, indifferent to station and status.

[From the April 1920 issue: Prison cruelty]

Tucked into a horseshoe along the Mississippi River, in West Feliciana Parish, Angola in the early months of the pandemic was home to roughly 5,500 criminally convicted men and visited daily by hundreds of staff. Some 75 percent of the incarcerated population was Black; almost all of the remainder was white. Most of us were middle-aged, though more than 300 were 70 and older. More than 3,700 were, like me, there for life. (I’ve been there for more than three decades; I was convicted of second-degree murder in 1990.)

At first, as the disease spread rapidly around the world and the country, we felt insulated by the expansive prison that enveloped us. We assumed that the same physical barriers that trapped our bodies would preserve our lives.

We were mistaken. Behind the 12-foot razor-topped fences and thick steel-and-concrete walls, we were vulnerable. There was no vaccine against the virus and nowhere we could go. It was a killer, and all we could do—the God-fearing and the godless—was pray.

On March 11, 2020, Governor John Bel Edwards declared a public-health emergency in Louisiana. The next day, the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections issued a series of responses intended to mitigate the virus’s impact. Prison visitation was suspended indefinitely. Outside guests and volunteers—educational, religious, social—were expelled, and off-site work crews were recalled. Within days, academic and vocational programs, club activities, and religious services were suspended, as were nonemergency medical trips, end-of-life visits and funerals, attorney meetings, and court appearances.

One of Angola’s unusual characteristics is the mobility its population enjoys. This is not a lockdown facility. Its incarcerated workforce powers the penitentiary machine, serving as dormitory and yard orderlies, laundry workers, teachers, tractor drivers, and so on. Jobs are the alternative to cell confinement, and they’re taken seriously. The prison offers school, self-help programs, and recreational activities—everyone can find something constructive to do to ward off stagnation.

Regional indigent defenders as well as advocacy groups such as the ACLU of Louisiana and the New Orleans–based Promise of Justice Initiative demanded the early release of vulnerable prisoners. State Attorney General Jeff Landry and the Department of Corrections—predicting a wave of crazed criminals menacing the citizenry—refused. The advocates moved on to softer suggestions aimed at low-level convictions.

Medical dormitories housing susceptible elderly and infirm inmates and a handful of health-care orderlies were locked down as a precaution, and residents were forbidden contact with other prisoners. Designated as “reverse isolation” units, the four dorms’ 86 inmates had little to do beyond watch TV, read, or sit in the sun when the yard was otherwise empty. They would remain under these extremely restrictive protocols for 14 months.

Two weeks into reverse isolation, a 67-year-old broad-bellied man called BoBo assessed medical segregation as, he put it to me, “better than I thought it would be.” After all, he believed, it was the safest way for a vulnerable subset to make it through the pandemic unscathed. BoBo was upbeat and appreciative. Less than a month later, a machine was keeping him alive in a Baton Rouge hospital. He somehow managed to survive.

Angola confirmed its first COVID case—a maintenance supervisor—as winter turned into spring. Before long, a prisoner became ill—an elderly man locked in reverse isolation whose bed was nearest the time clock used to verify employee rounds. From that point, and into the following year, the virus ran rampant among us. Positive cases were removed to isolated recovery quarters, and their entire housing unit was quarantined for 14 days. Hundreds of Angola prisoners tested positive in that first year.

Face masks became mandatory, although not everyone wore them. Personal hygiene was encouraged, although not everyone practiced it. Social distancing was required, but most people ignored it. In prison, routines don’t change very easily.

[Barbara Bradley Hagerty: America’s innocent prisoners are going to die of the coronavirus]

The population generally despised the masks, but it hated the quarantines. For some prisoners, the loss of mobility was almost maddening. Dormitory windows through which sunlight once poured had been painted over several years ago to help reduce summer’s tormenting heat. As a result, the dorms became a few degrees cooler, but they now resembled dim, rectangular tombs. Tensions inside were high, often escalating into physical confrontation. There were multiple instances of sick men refusing to seek medical attention for fear of starting a new 14-day-lockdown cycle for their dorm mates.

In the world outside the fences, the Pfizer vaccine became available to a limited population in December 2020. Prisoners age 70 and older received their first dose in February 2021. Most incarcerated people were eager for their turn, but some skeptics refused. As the drug was incrementally offered according to age, exposure, and health, men waited in winding lines as weary prison medical staff injected shoulder after shoulder. Finally, we had a shield stronger than a mask. By that summer, an overwhelming majority of us had been fully vaccinated.

By the end of that year, by our count at The Angolite, the prison-news magazine where I am an editor, 20 Angola prisoners had died of COVID-19. The oldest had been 84, and the youngest had been 50. The virus also killed four Angola staff members, according to UCLA’s Covid Behind Bars project. The coronavirus was not born in the caged environment; it piggybacked in on people’s indifference to the lives there.

Despite the fortress around us, we were not protected. Despite the early demands of advocates, we were not released. Despite the danger, the rest of the world continued to take risks, jeopardizing the lives of those of us with no say in our circumstances. Our perils were a footnote in the larger story of COVID. We had no voice. We were statistics waiting to be tallied. Most of us lived, but not all.