Doctors who have witnessed first-hand the harms of the abortion drug mifepristone to women and babies urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to keep a block on the drug in place.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, under the leadership of pro-abortion politicians, “repeatedly put politics above women’s health” in its decisions to approve and later expand the abortion drug, doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine said in a legal brief, Bloomberg News reports.
The medical alliance is challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone as an abortion drug, saying the agency misclassified pregnancy as a life-threatening illness to skirt the regulatory process and, later, began allowing abortion drugs to be sold through the mail in violation of federal law.
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas agreed with the doctors’ concerns and issued a temporary injunction blocking the abortion drug. However, the Biden administration quickly appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which could rule any day.
Responding to the appeal Tuesday, the medical alliance said overturning the temporary injunction “would perpetuate FDA’s unlawful mail order abortion regime and result in further harms from a dangerous drug the district court found should never have been approved.”
The medical alliance said U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s temporary injunction was “meticulously considered” and will not ban abortions in states where the practice is still legal, NBC News reports.
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Here’s more from the report:
The [Department of Justice] and [abortion pill manufacturer] Danco have requested that the 5th Circuit issue an “administrative stay” of Kacsmaryk’s ruling in order to allow more time for the legal process to play out, as well as a longer pause on the ruling during the course of the appeals process. …
“If allowed to take effect, the court’s order would thwart FDA’s scientific judgment and severely harm women, particularly those for whom mifepristone is a medical or practical necessity,” the Justice Department wrote in a previous filing. “This harm would be felt throughout the country, given that mifepristone has lawful uses in every state. The order would undermine healthcare systems and the reliance interests of businesses and medical providers.”
The order only blocks the FDA’s approval of mifepristone as an elective abortion drug. No state laws or court orders prevent doctors from using it to heal or save lives.
Dr. Robin Pierucci, of the American College of Pediatricians, which is a plaintiff in the case, said the ruling last week affirms what doctors have witnessed for decades: abortion drugs are dangerous to mothers and unborn babies.
“Chemical abortion drug’s side effects pose a known, direct medical threat to women and girls, and they are intentionally given to end the life of an immature human being,” Pierucci said. “The ruling affirms what science acknowledges, that chemical abortions are not safe and that political agendas, not medical excellence, have allowed for their continued use.”
Studies indicate the risks of the abortion drug are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
Along with millions of unborn babies’ deaths, the FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 28 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications. 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.
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.
Another new study from the University of Toronto, “Short-Term Adverse Outcomes After Mifepristone–Misoprostol Versus Procedural Induced Abortion,” published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that one in ten women who took the abortion pill had to go to the emergency room, according to Pregnancy Help News.
Recently, OB-GYNs have reported an alarming rise in women calling them traumatized after taking abortion pills and then delivering their aborted baby’s body at home. Even the pro-abortion website Aid Access, which sells abortion pills across the world — sometimes illegally, admits women may see their aborted baby’s body and it can be “distressing.”
Kacsmaryk quoted one harrowing testimony in his ruling: “… one woman was surprised and saddened to see that her aborted baby ‘had a head, hands, and legs’ with ‘[d]efined fingers and toes.’”
First approved under the Clinton administration, mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy – although some abortionists use it later. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone and basically starving the unborn baby to death. Typically, abortion groups also prescribe a second drug, misoprostol, to induce labor and expel the baby’s body.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, the drug now is used for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., killing nearly half a million babies a year.
