In a highly anticipated ruling on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion, can continue to be prescribed under the present standards.

Anti-abortion organizations tried to revert access to what was in place more than eight years ago, but the top court unanimously rejected their arguments, ruling that they lacked standing to file the lawsuit.

Patients would have had a harder time obtaining a prescription for mifepristone, which is used in roughly 63% of abortions performed in the United States and has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for usage up to 10 weeks gestation.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior lawyer, Erin Morrow Hawley, who represented the organization in court throughout the case argument, doesn’t think the fight against mifepristone access will end here.

In a call held soon after the decision was made, she stated that the three states—Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri—that had intervened in a lower court might still present their cases against mifepristone and perhaps even retain standing, or the ability to file a lawsuit.

“I anticipate that the legal battle with those three states will go on,” stated Hawley.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with Justice Clarence Thomas contributing a concurring opinion.

“Plaintiffs have genuine legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to mifepristone being prescribed and used by others. They are pro-life and oppose elective abortion,” Kavanaugh wrote.

He pointed out that safeguards have been put in place to prevent coerced abortion participation despite moral objections, as brought by the four anti-abortion medical groups and the four anti-abortion doctors who filed the original complaint against mifepristone.

Since the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, pro-life doctors have been safeguarded by federal conscience legislation, both legally and practically, according to Kavanaugh. “The plaintiffs have not identified any instances in which a physician was forced to perform an abortion or administer other abortion-related treatment that went against the physician’s conscience, despite the physician’s objections.”

Additionally, he stated, “There is no evidence in this record of hospitals overriding or refusing to accommodate doctors’ conscience objections.”

According to the decision, since the approval of the mifepristone in 2000, Alliance Defending Freedom has not “identified any instances where a doctor was required, notwithstanding conscience objections, to perform an abortion or to provide other abortion-related treatment that violated the doctor’s conscience.”

It’s possible that Kavanaugh also hinted to the court’s decision in a different abortion access issue that deals with the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, or EMTALA, later this session.

Because EMTALA does not place requirements on specific doctors, Kavanaugh ruled, “it does not require doctors to perform abortions or provide abortion-related medical treatment over their conscience objections.”

In his concurring opinion, Thomas expressed his agreement with the court’s unanimous ruling, which he did join, but he raised issues with the way the court applied a particular kind of standing.

“The Court explains that the doctors cannot establish third-party standing to sue for violations of their patients’ rights without showing an injury of their own,” Thomas said, “applying these precedents.”

Thomas went on, “But there’s a much easier reason to reject this theory: Our third-party standing doctrine is wrong.” “As I have previously stated, a plaintiff cannot use the rights of another person to establish an Article III case or controversy.”