The Supreme Court handed down an order Thursday night that doesn’t so much resolve a significant fight over abortion as delay a resolution — postponing it just long enough to ensure that the justices won’t need to weigh in until after the election.

The case, FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, involves a dispute over whether abortion patients should have an easier time obtaining a pill used as part of a two-drug regimen to terminate a pregnancy. Mifepristone, the drug at the center of American College, causes pregnancy tissue and the lining of the uterus to break down and separate from the uterus itself. About a day or two after taking mifepristone, the patient takes a second drug, misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions and expels the uterus’s contents.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of mifepristone for this purpose in 2000. Yet, while patents often take the drug at home, the FDA requires them to pick the drug up at a hospital, clinic, or medical office — it cannot be dispensed by a retail or mail-order pharmacy.

Under normal circumstances, this is a fairly minor burden on abortion patients’ ability to obtain an abortion. During a deadly pandemic, however, this requirement that patients receive mifepristone directly from their health provider is significantly more burdensome for a variety of reasons. Patients may be reluctant to travel to a clinic and risk infection, and many abortion providers are either closed or are operating at reduced capacity in order to limit the spread of Covid-19 (or, at least, they were at the time when the lower court order was handed down). Read more via Vox