(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Democrat representatives attempted to give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate abortion-causing medications, such as mifepristone, as state and federal-level governments grapple for power over legal jurisdiction on the matter.
Reps. Pat Ryan, N.Y., and Lizzie Fletcher, Texas, reintroduced the bill in response to a Texas judge’s ruling halting the FDA approval process on the drug.
According to Breitbart, the bill would also protect doctors and telehealth workers who shipped abortifacient medications across the country, particularly in states that outlawed the practice. Both Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America endorsed the bill.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives will likely kill the bill.
“A woman’s right to choose is one of our country’s foundational freedoms,” Ryan claimed. “These deeply personal and private medical decisions should be made by women and their families, not by extremist judges, courts, or politicians.”
Ryan argued that mifepristone is “safe and effective” and decried Texas officials for making “unscientific decisions” in order to institute a national abortion ban.
The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit against the FDA in November 2022 over the approval of four different chemical abortion drugs.
The suit gave six examples of agency actions taken to protect mifepristone and misoprostol since their legalization, and requested the U.S. District court for the Northern District of Texas hold the agency accountable.
The ADF argued that the only way the FDA could have approved these drugs “was to use its accelerated drug approval authority, necessitating the FDA to call pregnancy an ‘illness’ and argue that these dangerous drugs provide a ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit’ over existing treatments.”
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA did indeed approve of mifepristone unlawfully, arguing that “even a limited approval of this sort would still not render pregnancy an ‘illness.'”
“And surgical abortion — a statistically far safer procedure — would still be available to her. But in any case, that is not what FDA did,” Kacsmaryk wrote in his 67-page opinion on the case. “Instead, FDA manipulated and misconstrued the text … to greenlight elective chemical abortions on a wide scale.”
Mifepristone accounted for over half of all abortions in the United States. Cases fighting the use of the drug continue to crop up all over the country, in hopes of banning or at least severely limiting its use.
