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Far-right US judge suspends FDA approval of abortion pill mifepristone, but stays ruling for 7 days [1]

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Date: 2023-04-07  

The Washington Post is reporting that a federal judge in Texas has blocked FDA approval of a key abortion medication:

A federal judge in Texas blocked U.S. government approval of a key abortion medication Friday, siding with abortion foes in an unprecedented lawsuit and potentially upending nationwide access to the pill widely used to terminate pregnancies. The highly anticipated ruling puts on hold the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a medication first cleared for use in the United States in 2000. The ruling will not go into effect for seven days to give the government time to appeal. U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a nominee of President Donald Trump with long-held antiabortion views, agreed with the conservative groups seeking to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone as safe and effective, including in states where abortion rights are protected.

Anti=abortion groups went judge shopping to file the lawsuit to challenge the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion inducing drug, in Amarillo, Texas, where Kacsmaryk is the one federal judge presiding. The FDA is headquartered in Maryland.

Amarillo didn’t even have an abortion clinic before Texas all but banned the procedure in 2021, the ebt’ eveq gilrob shopping When anti-abortion groups wanted to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of an abortion-inducing drug, they didn’t file the lawsuit in Maryland, where the FDA is headquartered, or in any state where the pill is still legally prescribed.

They filed it in Amarillo, a Texas city that didn’t have an abortion clinic even before the state all but banned the procedure. The Texas Tribune reported.

Here’s what The Texas Tribute reported about Kacsmaryk’s background before and after he joined the federal bench:

Before Kacsmaryk was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2019, he was deputy counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a deeply conservative religious liberty law firm based in Plano. Under his leadership, First Liberty was involved in several legal fights over reproductive health care, including trying to block the “contraception mandate” which required health insurers to pay for birth control. Kacsmaryk himself has been outspoken in his opposition to LGBTQ rights. Since Kacsmaryk joined the bench, the Texas attorney general and private litigants have brought their most contentious suits to Amarillo, largely with the desired outcome. He reinstated the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy on behalf of Texas. He struck down efforts from the Biden administration to protect LGBTQ workers and trans youth. And he ruled that a longstanding federal program that gives teens confidential contraception violated state law.

Vice President Kamala Harris said the Texas judge’s decision set “a dangerous precedent,” CNN reported. She spoke to reporters at an airfield in Nashville after meeting with Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee a day after two black representatives were expelled from the legislature after supporting demonstrators calling for gun safety measures in the wake of a school shooting.

“It is contrary to what makes for good public health policy to allow courts and politicians to tell the FDA what it should do,” Harris said.

"As a general matter, I'll say that there is no question that the president and I are going to stand with the women of America and do everything we can to ensure that women have the ability to make decisions about their health care, their reproductive health care," Harris said.

The judge’s ruling invalidates the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. If the unprecedented ruling stands, it could make it harder for patients to get abortions even in blue states such as New York and California where abortion is legal.

The New York Times reported:

Less than an hour later, another federal judge in Washington state issued a ruling that directly contradicted the Texas decision, ordering the F.D.A. to make no changes to the availability of mifepristone. The conflicting orders by two federal judges appear to create a legal standoff likely to escalate to the Supreme Court. The drug will continue to be available at least in the short-term since the Texas judge stayed his own order for seven days to give the F.D.A. time to ask an appeals court to intervene. … The lawsuit in Washington state was filed against the F.D.A. by a dozen Democratic attorneys general. In a preliminary injunction in that case, Judge Thomas O. Rice blocked the agency from taking “any action to remove mifepristone from the market or otherwise cause the drug to become less available.”

More than half of the abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions which use a two-drug regimen — mifepristone and misoprostol. Misoprostol can induce abortions on its own, but is less effective and more prone to cause side effects like nausea.

Mifepristone blocks a hormone that allows a pregnancy to develop. The Times reported that In a court filing in the case, the FDA said that overturning its approval of mifepristone would “cause significant harm, depriving patients of a safe and effective drug that has been on the market for more than two decades.”

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the fundamental right to abortion established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the conservative majority. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

That left it up to each state to decide their own abortion policy until such times as Congress approved a national abortion policy.

But anti-abortion zealots were not content unless they could impose their forced-birther policies on the entire nation. Kacsmaryk’s ruling poses a challenge to SCOTUS because it puts to a lie their states’ rights contention in last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/7/2162743/-Far-right-U-S-judge-suspends-FDA-approval-of-abortion-pill-mifepristone

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