Extremist U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is expected any day now to issue a preliminary injunction attempting to force the FDA to suspend or withdraw approval from mifepristone, one of the two medications used in medication abortions. He may not get the immediate deference he is expecting.
Two abortion providers—Trust Women and Whole Woman’s Health—have already said they will not stop providing mifepristone based only on the Texas judge’s ruling, The Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener reported.
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“Mifepristone is one on the safest and most studied drugs in the U.S.,” Trust Women, which runs clinics in Kansas and Oklahoma, tweeted, “and no matter what Judge Kacsmaryk rules, until we receive an FDA directive, Mife remains legal & Trust Women will continue to provide medication abortions with mife + miso.”
Likewise, Whole Woman's Health tweeted, “Reminder: Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling will not have the power to ban MIFE immediately. The ball will be in the FDA’s court. No matter what the Judge says, Whole Woman’s Health can still offer medication abortion care with MIFE and MISO until we hear from the FDA.”
The network of clinics continued: “Abortion Providers are not the plaintiffs in this case. There will be no ‘immediate ban’ like we experienced in Texas with the reversal of Roe v. Wade last June. Only the FDA can make the decision to indefinitely or momentarily take Mifepristone off the market.”
”Again, there are a number of ways that this case could play out on *both* sides. So until an FDA directive is given—you can expect us to continue using Mifepristone in all of our clinics and in our abortion pills by mail program. Reach us for care in MN, MD, VA, IL, IN, and NM,” the organization concluded.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre similarly emphasized the FDA’s authority, though she stopped well short of saying that the Biden administration would take any specific action in response to the judge’s decision.
“I want to be careful here, I’m not going to get into any litigation that’s currently happening, can’t say anything that might to get in the way there. This is about FDA’s authority to make a independent, evidence-based decision on drugs,” Jean-Pierre told reporters. “This is what this is about. Decisions on what medication can be used in our country should not be determined in a court, they should be determined based on their safety, science, and the data. And so the bottom line is that mifepristone is safe and there’s no question about that. We know that because it’s been around for two decades, it’s in more than 60 countries around the globe, clearly it’s been exhaustively shown to be safe with real data on countless occasions and it has been used in this country, again, for more than 20 years. So we’ll wait for the next steps, not going to get involved in what the judge said yesterday.”
Medication abortions can be done using just misoprostol, the second of the two drugs in the current and most effective regimen. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, preventing the pregnancy from continuing to develop. Around 24 hours later, misoprostol is taken to soften the cervix and cause uterine contractions, expelling fetal tissue. This method has a 99.6% success rate. By contrast, misoprostol-only abortion has a success rate of around 80%. That means that banning mifepristone would increase the number of failed medication abortions that required medical follow-up and possibly surgical abortion. And that means more risks and more burdens for the people involved. Which is exactly the goal of the right-wing group that judge-shopped its way into a hearing before Kacsmaryk, knowing that he is both an anti-abortion extremist and a lawless judge who would entertain something as unprecedented as attempting to block the FDA’s authorization of a drug it authorized after a lengthy approval process more than two decades ago and that has been used safely ever since. This is not about anyone’s safety—again, we’re talking about something with a 0.4% chance of major complications and a mortality rate of less than 0.001%, while pregnancy and childbirth are far more dangerous. It’s about making false safety claims as the latest way to put safe abortion out of reach for as many people as possible.
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