By MARK SHERMAN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously preserved access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.

The justices ruled that abortion opponents lacked the legal right to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to ease access to it.

The case had threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that “federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions.” Kavanaugh was part of the majority to overturn Roe.

The high court is separately considering another abortion case, about whether a federal law on emergency treatment at hospitals overrides state abortion bans in rare emergency cases in which a pregnant patient’s health is at serious risk.

More than 6 million people have used mifepristone since 2000. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and primes the uterus to respond to the contraction-causing effect of a second drug, misoprostol. The two-drug regimen has been used to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks gestation.

Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.

President Joe Biden’s administration and drug manufacturers had warned that siding with abortion opponents in this case could undermine the FDA’s drug approval process beyond the abortion context by inviting judges to second-guess the agency’s scientific judgments. The Democratic administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone, argued that the drug is among the safest the FDA has ever approved.

The decision “safeguards access to a drug that has decades of safe and effective use,” Danco spokeswoman Abigail Long said in a statement.

The abortion opponents argued in court papers that the FDA’s decisions in 2016 and 2021 to relax restrictions on getting the drug were unreasonable and “jeopardize women’s health across the nation.”

Kavanaugh acknowledged what he described as the opponents’ “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone.”

But he said they went to the wrong forum and should instead direct their energies to persuading lawmakers and regulators to make changes.

Those comments pointed to the stakes of the 2024 election and the possibility that an FDA commissioner appointed by Republican Donald Trump, if he wins the White House, could consider tightening access to mifepristone.

The mifepristone case began five months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Abortion opponents initially won a sweeping ruling nearly a year ago from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee in Texas, which would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.

The Supreme Court put the appeals court’s modified ruling on hold, then agreed to hear the case, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of the decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.

___

By TOM KRISHER (AP Auto Writer)

DETROIT (AP) — Tesla shareholders are charting the future of the electric vehicle company Thursday as they wrap up voting whether or not to restore CEO Elon Musk’s massive pay package that was thrown out by a Delaware judge.

Shares of the company jumped at the opening bell Thursday after the company said in a regulatory filing that stockholders are voting to approve Musk’s pay, valued around $44.9 billion, by a wide margin.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Tesla published Musk’s own posts late Wednesday on X, the social media platform he owns, with charts that appeared to show that shareholders were in favor of his compensation package, as was a measure to move Tesla’s legal home from Delaware to Texas.

The company sought the votes after a Delaware judge threw out the pay package, worth in January. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick determined that Tesla deceived shareholders when the pay package was approved in 2018, so Musk is not entitled to the landmark package, which was worth nearly $56 billion before a stock slide this year.

Legal experts say that releasing vote totals while balloting is in progress could present problems for Tesla, and that may be why the company made the filing with the SEC, which is likely to look into the matter.

Shareholders can still cast votes online Thursday and in person Thursday afternoon at Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas. They also can change previously cast votes.

“Anytime you tell people you’re winning, you’re encouraging others to join you and those who oppose you to pull back,” said Charles Elson, a retired professor and founder of the corporate governance center at the University of Delaware.

Erik Gordon, a law and business professor at the University of Michigan, said Musk’s posts could draw legal scrutiny. “His post had better be accurate or else anyone who bought stock relying on it will have a securities law case against him,” Gordon said in an email.

The SEC declined comment Thursday, and a message was left seeking comment from Tesla.

Elson said posting corporate proxy vote totals before the balloting ends is “highly unusual.”

Social media posts by Musk have drawn scrutiny from the SEC before. He and Tesla were fined $40 million for statements about funding to make Tesla a private company that Musk made on X’s predecessor, Twitter, before he bought the social media platform.

Shares of Tesla shot up nearly 7% to $189.20 in trading before Thursday’s opening bell. The stock is down about 30% this year.

If the pay package is approved, it would almost guarantee that Musk would remain at the company he grew to be the world leader in electric vehicles, shifting to AI and robotics including autonomous vehicles, which Musk says is Tesla’s future.

But if shareholders were to vote against his pay, the CEO could deliver on threats to take artificial intelligence research to one of his other companies. Or he could even walk away from Tesla.

Even with approval, there would be uncertainty. Musk has threatened on X to develop AI elsewhere if he doesn’t get a 25% stake in Tesla (He owns about 13% now). Musk’s xAI recently received $6 billion in funding to develop artificial intelligence.

According to Musk, early indications suggest that shareholders also back a move to relocate Tesla’s legal home to Texas, and out of Delaware.

The move is designed to escape from the Delaware court’s oversight and possibly from McCormick’s ruling. In a January opinion on a shareholder lawsuit, the judge determined that Musk controlled the Tesla board and is not entitled to the landmark pay package.

Multiple institutional investors have come out against that sizeable payout, some citing falling vehicle sales, price cuts and the tumbling Tesla stock price. But Tesla’s top five institutional shareholders, Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, Geode Capital, and Capital Research either said they don’t announce their votes or wouldn’t comment. They control about 17% of the votes.

One institutional investor who came out against the package is California’s State Teachers Retirement System. The large pension fund said Tuesday that it would vote against Musk’s pay “based on its sheer magnitude, and because the award would be extremely dilutive to shareholders. We also have concerns with the lack of focus on profitability for the company.”

In May, two big shareholder advisory firms, ISS and Glass Lewis, recommended voting against the package.

But Tesla and Musk have unleashed a furious lobbying effort to get the package approved, in posts on X, television appearances and in proxy filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm, in a letter to shareholders, wrote that the package was approved by 73% of the vote six years ago. “Because the Delaware Court second-guessed your decision, Elon has not been paid for any of his work for Tesla for the past six years that has helped to generate significant growth and stockholder value. That strikes us — and the many stockholders from whom we already have heard — as fundamentally unfair, and inconsistent with the will of the stockholders who voted for it,” she wrote.

Tesla has said the 2018 award incentivized Musk to create over $735 billion in value for shareholders in the six years since it was approved.

If Tesla finalizes the vote on moving the company’s legal home to Texas before the vote on Musk’s pay package, and it manages to file the paperwork in Austin and get approval of the move, then the effect of the Delaware court ruling could be in doubt. Reapproval of the pay package would then be done as a Texas corporation and could fall under the purview of Texas courts.

Anticipating a quick move by Tesla, lawyers for the shareholder who filed the lawsuit seeking to block Musk’s pay deal, Richard Tornetta, filed motions in Delaware last month seeking an order stopping Tesla from trying to move the case. Tesla responded in letters to the judge that there is no cause for such concerns because they won’t seek a move. Besides, Tesla would still be a Delaware corporation at the time of this week’s shareholder vote, they wrote.

In an order denying Tornetta’s motions, Chancellor McCormick wrote that she interprets Tesla’s letters to mean it has no intention of relocating the case to Texas. “The defendants’ statements give me great comfort,” she wrote.

Eric Talley, a Columbia University law professor, said the lawyers are unlikely to try to move the case because their livelihood is handling business cases in Delaware courts.

But it’s also possible that the unpredictable Musk could change lawyers.

McCormick, Talley said, is telling the lawyers “OK, I’m going to believe you, but I’m going to be really irritated if this is a big send up for these things that you said you’re not going to do.”

Talley, who also is a Tesla shareholder and said at present he plans to vote against Musk’s pay, expects Tesla to follow through with appealing McCormick’s ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court.

Shares of Tesla Inc. rose more than 6% in early trading Thursday.

How can a man who is warm understand a man who is cold? This is a question posed by a prisoner in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who himself spent many years in Soviet labor camps. As a student in my humanities classroom once noted, by reading a book like this, a man who is warm can better understand a man who is cold.

This is the power of books in granting a reader such as this student entry into experience far from their own. We need the humanities because they help us better understand the experiences of one another, which enhances understanding across differences and divides and promotes peace at home and elsewhere.

Failures of empathy in the U.S. and around the world, as evidenced by incivility, conflict and war, demonstrate how we need the humanities today more than ever to remind us of our fundamental and shared humanity. Yet the number of humanities degrees conferred has steadily decreased since 2012, and humanities programs are under threat nationwide. For example, West Virginia University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro closed programs, while the state of Indiana is proposing to reduce the amount of world languages, literatures and culture class requirements from its high school curriculum.

If Solzhenitsyn’s account of a Soviet prison camp seems distant from today, one need only remember Alexei Navalny, who suffered under harsh conditions in an Arctic prison camp and whose death in February demonstrated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutality toward Russia’s most visible opposition leader. Currently waging an unjustified war on Ukraine, Russia has been cast as a key enemy, yet Russian literature, often written under repressive conditions and itself under attack, continues to offer wisdom on everything under the sun, as students discover in my humanities classroom: the horror of war, the meaning of life, the problem of death, the power of art, failure to communicate, love and loss.

Still today, nothing else can so powerfully simulate an experience of being someone else in another time and place. For example, a book can offer the experience of being a young person who has a mistaken idea, murdering someone for it, and viscerally feeling the crime’s consequences even before any punishment begins, and thus understanding why one should not kill. The humanities investigate and offer this kind of why, tackling the big questions, the ones most worth asking and the ones we forget at our peril.

To better understand people from other world regions on their own terms, there is no better way than to learn another language or study abroad. Thought itself may be reframed by learning another language, such as Russian, which divides nouns into things that have a soul and those that do not. Study abroad reveals that people everywhere, despite conflicts and wars that divide us, are all alike.

Not only do the humanities make good people and good citizens, but they also are good for future careers.

Despite a widespread misperception that a humanities degree is it not good for any job, humanities training actually is good for every job. Skills such as critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, and collaboration with others, including those from different backgrounds, are in demand from employers. The U.S. government needs foreign language expertise and supports the study of critical languages that are crucial for national security and in international relations. Global or multicultural understanding often figures in university mission statements, while society needs universities to equip young people to tackle problems on a global scale and to cultivate skills and flexibility of mind to deal with the unexpected.

Yet, even as the world stands at the brink of catastrophe and conflict, meaning such skills are needed more than ever, language enrollments are declining. This foreign language deficit leaves society less prepared to face global challenges, despite a recent reorientation toward Russia and China due to national security concerns. Study abroad in China has declined dramatically, to the detriment of foreign relations in the future, while opportunities to study abroad in Russia have shut down completely. Yet hope is not lost, since programs to study Russian have sprung up in Armenia, Georgia, Baltic countries and Central Asia, giving double the bang for the buck in learning about multiple world regions at once.

The world situation today calls for more support for the humanities, the study of foreign languages and study-abroad opportunities, since there is no better way to cultivate understanding of other people across boundaries and to discover common humanity around the world.

Yet cuts to the humanities are rising, demonstrating the impact of a decade of investment in only science, technology, engineering and math fields and the denigration of non-STEM fields. Thankfully, the solution to the humanities crisis is surprisingly simple: “The programs that are thriving are the ones that the schools are investing in,” Modern Language Association Executive Director Paula Krebs observed. “It’s kind of a no-brainer.”

So the humanities crisis is actually a funding crisis. Reversing it will benefit global understanding. It is time to rediscover the value of the humanities for all humanity.

Sara Pankenier Weld is a professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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