Everyone who told you that either "Republicans will stop at Dobbs" or "The Right learned their lessons from the 2022 midterms" (or both!) really don't deserve to be listened to, because they are either liars or chumps.
Abortion foes sued the Food and Drug Administration in federal court in Texas on Friday in an effort to reverse the agency’s decades-old approval of mifepristone, the drug used in medication abortions.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that has been involved in antiabortion litigation, filed the suit in Amarillo on behalf of four antiabortion medical organizations and four doctors who had treated patients with the drug. The suit also named the Health and Human Services Department as a defendant.
The suit claims that the FDA lacked the authority to approve the drug, did not adequately study the medication and that the drug is unsafe. More than half the abortions in the United States are performed using mifepristone.
The “FDA failed America’s women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States,” the lawsuit said. The suit said the agency erred in approving the drug under an expedited process that is intended to speed consideration of therapies for life-threatening illnesses, not a condition like pregnancy.
“Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit — they end a baby’s life and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother,” Julie Marie Blake, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel, said in a statement.
Attorneys for Alliance Defending Freedom served on the legal team that helped defend Mississippi in the case that led the Supreme Court in June to strike down Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion.
The Biden administration and abortion rights advocates denounced the suit.
“For decades, women in this country have had access to FDA-approved medication abortion as a safe and effective option,” HHS said. “As [HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra] said, denying women access to any essential care they need is downright dangerous and extreme.”
The FDA said it does not comment on pending litigation.
Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain a pregnancy. The FDA approved the medication as safe and effective through the first seven weeks of pregnancy about two decades ago, then later extended it to 10 weeks. The drug is sometimes used “off label” after that. Patients follow the use of mifepristone with misoprostol, which causes the uterus to empty.
Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who has written extensively about the abortion pill, denounced the group’s safety claims as “ridiculous.”
“Mifepristone is one of the safest drugs on the market, safer than Viagra and penicillin,” Donley said. “We have a lot of studies and a lot of data on it.”
Donley said the legal claims in the suit were “really weak.” She said the agency approved the drug under the expedited procedure because it allowed the FDA to impose restrictions on its use — restrictions that she and other abortion rights advocates think should be eliminated.
Donley said she didn’t know of any other suit that has tried to undo the FDA’s approval of abortion medication.
Loren Colson, a family medicine physician in Idaho and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, said mifepristone is “an incredibly safe medication.”
“It’s been well-studied and much safer than a lot of things you can find over the counter,” Colson said. “If they are trying to argue the safety, they have very little ground to stand on. It’s just a clear and blatant attack on abortion.”
The same Trump federal judge that tossed the Biden administration's LGBTQ+ protections under the Affordable Care Act a week ago now has this case.
They got Kacsmaryk.
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) November 20, 2022
The likelihood that this crank Trump judge will declare half of all abortions in the United States illegal, and issue a nationwide injunction because that’s what crank Trump judges do, is frighteningly high. https://t.co/b8XGX6MGB4
A national injunction on these drugs would end half the abortions in this country overnight, even in states where abortion is still legal. They can also choose to tie up the case in the courts and leave the injunction standing into 2023 or even 2024. By then, irreversible damage will have been done to millions of women in America, the kind only voting Democratic in massive numbers can even begin to fix.
That's the point.
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