The next frontier in the post-Roe battle to save unborn babies is a Texas courtroom, where a federal judge could rule this month that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must remove the abortion pill mifepristone, also known as RU-486, from the market.
The Associated Press reports that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed the lawsuit, which argues that the FDA used a review process designed to fast-track medicines “serious or life-threatening illnesses” to accelerate mifepristone’s arrival onto the marketplace in 2000.
“Our representatives in Congress created the FDA and gave the FDA the responsibility to make sure that drugs are safe before they’re allowed on the market … the FDA failed that responsibility,” said ADF Senior Counsel Julie Blake.
For its part, the FDA argues that “it didn’t accelerate the drug’s approval, which came four years after the manufacturer first submitted its application to market the pill.”
Twenty-two Democrat-run states are chiming in that a ruling against keeping the pill on the market would be “nothing short of catastrophic,” while a group of states with abortion restrictions on the books says that the nationwide availability of the drug contradicts the laws in those states.
Related: ‘They Don’t Know Pro-Life People Well’: the Bravery of Pregnancy Centers Facing Threats
Pro-abortion groups are gearing up for a fight, and they’re already employing the most melodramatic language possible.
“It could have an immediate impact on the country,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “In some ways this is a backdoor ban on abortion.”
What makes the left go even more apoplectic about this case is that U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee. Even though Kacsmaryk has given no indication of how he may rule in the case, the media is already suffering from the vapors, breathlessly painting him as an extremist.
“There is scant precedent for a lone judge overruling the FDA’s scientific decisions,” the AP reports. “A swift appeal of any ruling is likely.”
The Guardian, a UK news outlet trying to get all up in America’s business, refers to Kacsmaryk as a “rogue” judge, and New York Magazine employs similar language. Last month, Vox referred to Kacsmaryk as a “Christian rights activist” — I suppose it would alarm Vox to discover that Christians do, in fact, have rights.
In addition to potentially removing the abortion pill from the market, Kacsmaryk “could also issue a ruling rolling back regulators’ decisions to ease restrictions on the pill’s availability,” according to the AP. Those points of availability include mail-order dispensing of the pill.
The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, which the AP goes out of its way to refer to as a “science-based research group that supports abortion rights,” has pointed out that abortion by pill accounted for over half of the abortions committed before the end of Roe.
Guttmacher’s Elizabeth Nash told the AP that, after the Dobbs decision, “being able to provide medication abortion is very, very important.” (Remember, it’s “science-based” to kill unborn babies.) Nash also worries that taking the abortion pill off the market could increase wait times at abortion clinics. Poor things.
Pray for Judge Kacsmaryk to make the right decision, and pray that the pro-life movement can continue to make advances to protect the lives of the unborn.
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