Abortion Pill Maker Plans Massive Lawsuit to Sell Abortion Drugs in Pro-Life States That Protect Babies

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jun 29, 2022   |   5:59PM   |   Washington, DC

A major manufacturer of abortion drugs wants to thwart state efforts to protect unborn babies from abortion by filing lawsuits challenging their restrictions on the drug, according to a new Politico report.

GenBioPro already is challenging a Mississippi law that restricts the abortion drug mifepristone, and it plans to sue other pro-life states soon, a lawyer for the company told Politico.

The Mississippi law is “an impermissile effort by Mississippi to establish its own drug approval policy and directly regulate the availability of drugs within the state,” the GenBioPro lawsuit states, Reason reports.

Ken Parsigian of the law firm Latham & Watkins, which represents the drug manufacturer, said they believe states should be required to follow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determinations about mifepristone.

“The FDA’s determined it’s safe and effective and in the interest of public health for this drug to be very readily available,” Parsigian said. “We’re going to be pressing it because this is obviously a lot more critical to a lot of women than it was a week ago.”

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Mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. It blocks the hormone progesterone and basically starves the baby to death. For decades, the FDA required that abortionists provide the drug in-person after a medical examination because of its high risks.

In December, however, the Biden administration got rid of the in-person requirement and began allowing the drug to be sold through the mail. Now, women – or their abusers – can buy the abortion drug online without ever seeing or even talking to a doctor.

In response, Mississippi and several other states passed laws banning mail-order abortion drugs and requiring that mifepristone be provided in-person by a doctor.

Lawmakers pointed to studies showing that the risks of the abortion drug are much more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 requiring hospital treatment. A recent study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that the rate of abortion-related emergency room visits by women taking the abortion drug increased more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015.

However, the Biden administration believes mail-order abortion drugs are a way America can keep aborting unborn babies even in states that protect their lives under the law.

On Friday in reaction to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden promised to make sure the abortion drug mifepristone remains available to women to “fullest extent possible.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland also mentioned the abortion drug Friday, telling states that they “may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”

Here’s more from Politico:

Some legal scholars who favor abortion rights argue the FDA should assert that its drug-approval decisions preempt actions by states to limit or ban use of mifepristone. The notion of preemption, which derives from the Constitution’s supremacy clause, says that federal law trumps state law when the two conflict. …

Parsigian said he has no knowledge of the Justice Department’s legal strategy on abortion medication access but noted that Garland’s statement was consistent with GenBioPro’s argument in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.

“If [Garland had] mentioned our suit by name, it would have fit right into what he said,” Parsigian said. “We are doing what he said they want to do.”

Abortion drugs are big business. Mifepristone now is used for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. In 2020, the drug was responsible for 54 percent of all unborn babies’ abortion deaths, up from 39 percent in 2017, the pro-abortion research group found.

The FDA has linked the abortion drug to at least 26 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications between 2000 and 2018. However, under President Barack Obama, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported. So the numbers almost certainly are much higher.

LifeNews recently published an article highlighting eight facts that every woman should know about the abortion drug.