The Supreme Court can protect families or protect corporate cover-ups

When you get pregnant, doctors warn you to avoid everything from coffee to deli meat. When you build a home — as a spouse, parent, or homeowner — you make careful choices about what comes through the front door, onto your table, and into your yard.

But what if those precautions don’t matter? What if the food you serve, the lawn your kids play on, or the weeds you spray carry a poison approved through fraud, sold without warnings, and protected from accountability by the Supreme Court?

We ask parents to obsess over lunch meat. We can demand at least as much honesty about what gets sprayed on the yard.

That isn’t paranoia. It’s the situation Americans may soon face.

The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, a case pushed aggressively by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018. The justices will decide one narrow but decisive question this term: Does federal pesticide law block state failure-to-warn lawsuits when the Environmental Protection Agency has not required a cancer warning on the label?

Bayer wants the answer to be yes. It wants federal pre-emption — a legal shield that turns an EPA-approved label into immunity. If Bayer wins, state juries could lose the ability to hold companies accountable even when families prove they used a product as directed, got sick, and never received a warning.

That outcome would reward the very behavior the law should punish.

Juries across the country have already heard evidence in Roundup cases and awarded billions to plaintiffs who developed cancer after using the herbicide. Yet Roundup still sells without a cancer warning. Now Bayer wants the Supreme Court to slam the courthouse door on future victims for good.

Consider what that means in human terms.

Pregnant mothers avoid raw fish and unpasteurized cheese to protect their children, yet millions of families unknowingly expose themselves to chemicals linked in research to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers. A major meta-analysis published in the journal Pediatrics found that children exposed to residential pesticides face significantly higher risks of leukemia and lymphoma. Another peer-reviewed 2019 meta-analysis linked glyphosate-based herbicides to an increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

We get lectures about sushi, but weed killer gets a pass.

This fight should feel familiar. During COVID, Americans were told to trust emergency approvals as official guidance shifted rapidly. Those who raised concerns often got mocked or sidelined. Only later did many learn the story was more complicated than the public was allowed to hear.

We can’t undo that confusion. We can refuse to repeat it.

The evidence here does not revolve around a single labeling dispute. The deeper allegation is deception. Critics claim Monsanto relied on ghostwritten research and buried evidence to convince regulators glyphosate was safe — and that those approvals then became the foundation for selling Roundup without a cancer warning.