Trump-Appointed Judge in Texas May Restrict Abortion Pill

From interview with Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at The Nation.

If the judge succeeds in revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been on the market in the United States for 23 years, then it would have a catastrophic impact specifically in states where abortion is legal. I mean, we’re talking about this hearing taking place in a state that’s not even going to be impacted by it, because abortion is already banned in Texas. And so, this would reverberate across states like where I’m sitting, in Massachusetts, New York, California, states where abortion is legal.

The abortion pill mifepristone is the first of two drugs used in the standard of care for medication abortion. And so, what providers across the country have been preparing to do in preparation for this ruling is to start providing misoprostol-only abortions, so medication abortion using only the second drug in the protocol. That still works, but it’s less effective. It’s about 88% effective, according to a recent study, versus up to 99% when it’s used with mifepristone. And it causes more intense suffering, more cramping, more prolonged bleeding, and a more intensive process for the person going through that medication abortion. So we’re talking about imposing suffering on medication abortion patients across the country.

...medication abortion using mifepristone is the most popular method of abortion, used in more than half of abortions nationwide. So this could have a huge impact. Of course, it depends on exactly what the Food and Drug Administration does in response to this ruling. And there’s a growing chorus of voices saying that the FDA should simply choose to ignore this ruling and that providers should continue to offer this drug where they can. So, I think it’s unclear exactly what the impact will be, until we have a decision.

But I think this really should put to bed any pretense that this was ever about states’ rights or about returning abortion to the elected representatives in the states, which is what the Supreme Court claimed that it was doing with the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, right? In fact, what we’re seeing is an effort to ban abortion nationwide using what anti-abortion legal strategists hope is a judicial pipeline that’s going to allow them to go all the way up to the Supreme Court and have a sympathetic anti-abortion hearing.