Doctors urged the U.S. Supreme Court to protect women and babies from the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone Tuesday, saying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration put politics ahead of people’s lives.
The case, filed by doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, challenges the federal agency’s approval and later expansion of the abortion drug mifepristone under Democrat presidential administrations.
The abortion drug now is used for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year.
“The FDA should have to answer for the damage it has done to the rule of law and the harm it has caused by putting politics ahead of the health of countless women and girls,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erin Hawley, who is representing the doctors.
In their brief Tuesday, the doctors told the Supreme Court that the FDA failed to study the safety of mifepristone and ignored federal law when it began allowing the drug to be sold through the mail without direct medical oversight.
“Across decades, the agency has stripped away every meaningful and necessary safeguard on chemical abortion, demonstrating callous disregard for women’s well-being, unborn life, and statutory limits,” their brief states.
They urged the Supreme Court to allow a temporary injunction by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to go into effect.
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Earlier this month, a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the FDA’s approval of mifepristone as an abortion drug. The Biden administration appealed, and the Fifth Circuit modified the order to allow the abortion drug to remain on the market but only with restrictions that the Biden and Obama administrations had removed.
When the Biden administration appealed again, the Supreme Court put the Fifth Circuit decision on hold until Wednesday to give both parties a chance to make their arguments.
If the high court sides with the doctors, dangerous mail-order abortions could be prohibited in the U.S. as soon as the end of this week. Other regulations that were in effect for many years also would be reinstated.
Here’s more from Courthouse News:
Instead of being able to prescribe abortion pills via telehealth, patients would be required to schedule three doctor visits. Abortion seekers would also be required to take the medication in a doctor’s office instead of at their homes. …
The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories — mifepristone’s maker — asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief on Friday. The government said it would take months for the FDA to relabel any mifepristone currently on the market, the outcome that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling requires. Meanwhile a generic version of mifepristone would have to forfeit its approval.
But the doctors warned that lives are at risk, and the court must block the dangerous abortion drug. As emergency room physicians and OB-GYNs, the doctors said they have witnessed “the enormous pressure and stress caused by emergency treatment from chemical abortion [abortion drugs] gone wrong.”
They said the FDA and Danco have “brazenly flouted the law” for decades, disregarding their own safety data and evading judicial review to push abortion drugs on the American public. Under the Obama administration, the FDA even stopped requiring non-fatal complications to be reported, they continued.
“Without a stay, mifepristone will result in more physical complications, emotional trauma and even death for women,” they told the court.
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.
Studies indicate abortion risks are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with about one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the pro-abortion movement has been pushing abortion drugs even more heavily, and some groups send the drugs to women in pro-life states illegally.
In recent years, abortion drugs have been used for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies annually, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been trying to expand the life-destroying drugs even further, first by allowing mifepristone to be sold through the mail without any direct medical supervision, and, more recently, by allowing pharmacies like Walgreens, CVS and RiteAid to sell them.
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.
