Abortion facilities in Virginia, Montana and Kansas filed a new lawsuit Monday to make sure they can keep selling dangerous abortion pills to women through the mail without ever involving a doctor.
The lawsuit is just one of many in an on-going battle over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval and later expansion of mifepristone as an elective abortion drug. The main lawsuit involves a group of OB-GYNs and emergency room physicians who say the drug is dangerous and should be removed from the market.
In the newest lawsuit, the AP reports the abortion facilities want a court to let them keep selling abortion drugs in the states where they practice. They also want the courts to keep in place a recent de-regulation by the Biden administration allowing mail-order abortions without the supervision of a doctor.
“If won, this lawsuit will protect mifepristone in-clinic and abortion pills by mail, and allow nurse practitioners to provide medication abortion,” Whole Woman’s Health, one of the plaintiffs, wrote on Twitter.
The abortion facilities also want the FDA to get rid of the few remaining safety regulations, including a training certification required to dispense mifepristone and patient consent forms that inform women of the potential risks, according to the AP. They claim these long-standing safety regulations “stigmatize and undermine access to medication abortion.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion legal group representing the abortion facilities, claims the abortion drug is “essential healthcare” and the back-and-forth court decisions about it are chaotic and unfair.
“Over the last few months, access to mifepristone has been repeatedly disrupted by one legal development after another, creating chaos and confusion for abortion providers and people seeking care,” said Rabia Muqaddam, senior staff attorney at the pro-abortion group, in a statement. “Mifepristone is an essential medication for patients, and we’re filing this lawsuit to ensure providers in these three states are able to continue their operations and provide their patients with the health care they need, without interference.”
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Others involved in the lawsuit include Whole Woman’s Health Alliance in Virginia, Whole Woman’s Health based in Minnesota, Blue Mountain Clinic in Montana, Trust Women in Kansas and abortionist Helen Weems, of Montana.
Millions of unborn babies have been killed with the abortion drug mifepristone, or RU-486, since its approval under the Clinton administration in 2000. Currently, it is used for almost half of all abortions in the U.S., killing approximately 400,000 unborn babies every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The major abortion drug case from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and a hearing is scheduled for May 17.
Doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine say the FDA put lives at risk by failing to properly study the safety of mifepristone under Democratic presidential administrations, and its approval as an elective abortion drug should be revoked.
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.”
In April, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk blocked the abortion drug from the market, but the Fifth Circuit limited the temporary injunction and then the U.S. Supreme Court put it on hold.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice claim the abortion drug is very safe, even when taken without medical supervision, and women would be harmed if the court restricts or bans it. Its safety is “amply supported by a record developed over decades of safe and effective use” world-wide, the DOJ told the Fifth Circuit in its most recent filing, according to the Washington Examiner.
But the doctors contend that they and their patients are being harmed by the FDA’s reckless approval and expansion of the abortion drug.
“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,” they said in their argument to the U.S. Supreme Court in April.
They said the FDA failed to properly study the safety of mifepristone and, under the Biden administration, ignored federal law when it began allowing the drug to be sold through the mail without direct medical oversight.
They said the FDA and the abortion drug manufacturer 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.
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.
The FDA has linked mifepristone to 28 women’s deaths between 2000 and 2018. At least two more women have died since then, although the number likely is 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.
