One of the most common and safe abortion drugs could be banned nationwide this week—regardless of a state’s abortion restrictions.
One of the most common and safe abortion drugs could be banned nationwide on Friday, thanks to a lawsuit that could affect every state in the country—regardless of that state’s abortion restrictions.
Supporters and opponents of abortion rights are preparing for a ruling in a lawsuit, filed late last year, that accused the Food and Drug Administration of overstepping its authority when it approved the use of the drug mifepristone for on abortions. While the lawsuit was initially considered a longtime legal oddity by abortion rights activists, that attitude quickly changed once people realized the lawsuit would most certainly be presided over by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk , appointed by former President Donald Trump and known to all. for his conservative views on abortion.
“It’s not a good claim, but it’s probably going to be accepted,” Joanna Grossman, a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, said. told VICE News earlier this month.
“People are more concerned not because the legal theory starts to make more sense when they think about it. They’re more concerned because they realize it’s going to a judge who is likely to rule in a purely ideological and not related to the law,” Grossman said, describing Kacsmaryk as a “loose cannon.”
In early February, Kacsmaryk asked for additional briefings from the parties in the case on or before February 24, setting up the possibility that he will implement a nationwide injunction on mifepristone as soon as this Friday.
If he decides to take mifepristone off the market, the ruling would mark the first time a court has overturned the FDA’s new drug approval process “unilaterally and over the FDA’s objection,” according to a draft of an article which was released earlier this month by law. professors David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché. However, 22 Republican attorneys general filed a brief asserting their support for the lawsuit.
First approved in 2000, mifepristone has become one of the most studied drugs on the market, law professors said. Commonly used in the United States with the drug misoprostol to induce drug abortions, as well as to manage miscarriages, it is 18 times safer than childbirth.
If mifepristone is banned, many abortion providers have said they plan to switch to performing misoprostol-only abortions. In a press call earlier this month, Ashley Brink, director of the Wichita, Kansas-based abortion clinic Trust Women, told reporters that Trust Women would be making the switch.
“However, not every clinic can pivot quickly to a miso-only protocol,” Brink said in a press call. “It will affect their capacity if they can only provide abortion care by procedure,” or surgical abortions.
Although a nationwide ban on mifepristone would certainly cut off legal sources of the drug, it would not necessarily affect efforts to ship mifepristone for use in self-managed abortions. In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the number of Americans seeking help to end their pregnancies at home nearly tripled, according to a November study by Aid Accessan organization that ships abortion pills to Americans—including those in states where abortion is prohibited.
Although the lawsuit focuses primarily on the FDA and its approval of mifepristone, it also argues that the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 19th-century anti-obscenity law, should be used to ban the mailing of all abortion-related material—including pills. Anti-abortion activists across the country increasingly began to point to the Comstock Act in their efforts to block access to abortion pills. After Walgreens and CVS said they would give mifepristone to people with prescriptions, 20 Republican attorney generals sent a letter to pharmacy chains suggesting that the Comstock Act would follow them.
Kacsmaryk doesn’t have to rule on the Comstock Act banning abortion pills nationwide, but if he takes that argument, the US Postal Service could have a hard time enforcing it. A 2018 report from the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the Postal Service has long been the mail service of choice for drug dealers: Of the 104 “drug product sites” the office examined, 92 percent said they used the Postal Service. Of those, 41 percent seem so confident that their illegal goods will remain undetected by the Postal Service that they “offer free, partial, or full reshipment if the package doesn’t arrive at the buyer’s address because it was confiscated, stolen, or lost. ,” according to the report.
“One cocaine trafficker said he used the Postal Service to successfully distribute nearly 4,000 shipments, saying they had a 100 percent delivery success rate,” the report added.
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkgkd/us-abortion-pill-ban-lawsuit
