Alliance Defending Freedom and the Jubilee Campaign’s Law of Life Project filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Oklahoma Supreme Court Tuesday on behalf of doctors specializing in obstetrics and gynecology who support a state law pertaining to chemical abortions.
The law required doctors who prescribe the abortion drug RU-486 to abide by FDA requirements that the agency provides for use of the drug. The Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the law last year as an “undue burden” on those seeking abortions, but the U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case and has asked the state’s high court for clarity on its decision.
“One of the government’s top priorities should be to protect the health and safety of its citizens, and that’s all that Oklahoma is trying to do,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Steven H. Aden. “Abiding by FDA protocols clearly does not place an undue burden on access to abortion, and the medical specialists that have filed this brief confirm this. Oklahoma is right to place the health and safety of its citizens above the bottom line and ideology of abortionists.”
“The longstanding opposition of abortion sellers to reasonable safety regulations is unconscionable,” said Jubilee Campaign General Counsel Sam Casey. “The law places no restrictions on surgical abortions or on the use of drugs to treat ectopic pregnancies. Although no abortion is truly safe, we hope the Oklahoma Supreme Court will agree with these doctors that this state law properly reflects the sound medical evidence that the FDA-approved protocols are at least safer for women than off-label uses to induce a medical abortion.”
In 2011, the Center for Reproductive Rights challenged the Oklahoma law, HB 1970. A state judge struck it down, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision in December 2012. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the decision in Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice but placed the case on hold until the Oklahoma Supreme Court has time to answer questions that the nation’s high court posed to it.
