For nearly a week, one of the most common drugs used in medical abortions, mifepristone, has been in judicial limbo, posing the biggest threat to the reproductive rights of American women since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade a year ago
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(the antecedent that made the interruption of pregnancy constitutional).
On Friday, in Amarillo (Texas), Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk —an appointment of Donald Trump— provisionally paralyzed access to this pill that is used, combined with mifoprostol, in more than half of the pregnancy interruptions that occur in the country.
On the same day, another magistrate in the State of Washington, Thomas O. Rice, ordered the Government to maintain the supply in the 17 States that had requested it.
On Monday, the Department of Justice appealed the decision of the Texas judge before the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which on Wednesday night issued its ruling: access to the pill is maintained, although with restrictions.
As of this Friday —although the judicial decision can still be appealed—, the administration of this pill will be limited to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, reducing the range of the ten weeks in which it was since the year 2000. And to have access to it, women must have three consultations with the doctor, in person, something that was no longer mandatory since, in 2021, the Joe Biden Administration made the possibility of receiving the medical prescription by mail permanent, after testing that practice during the pandemic to avoid unnecessary visits to the doctor;
although on the FDA website you can read that the agency "does not recommend buying mifepristone online."
These new legal fluctuations on abortion in the United States have their origin in the lawsuit that the recently created anti-abortion group from Texas, Alliance for a Hippocratic Medicine, filed against the FDA in November for having approved the use of that pill, usually distributed with the trade name of Mifeprex and also available as an active principle, for more than 23 years.
The organization accuses the agency of removing "most safeguards that protect women and girls from the dangers of mifepristone," and that, according to the lawsuit, "has made chemical abortion more widely available and less expensive." medical supervision, which causes more women and girls to experience complications, which increases emergency situations.”
Since its approval, the agency estimates that some 3.7 million patients have resorted to mifepristone, and there are no more serious adverse reactions than those of widely used drugs such as paracetamol or penicillin.
After the hearing of more than four hours last week for that lawsuit, the Texan judge decided to provisionally paralyze the administration of the pill;
and almost immediately, Judge O. Rice, in Washington, asked the Government to maintain it.
On Monday, in less than 24 business hours since those two court orders clashed, hundreds of biotech and pharmaceutical company executives signed an open letter calling for the reversal of the Kacsmaryk ruling, saying it undermines FDA authority and ignores decades of scientific evidence on the safety of this drug.
US President Joe Biden also declared almost immediately in a statement that he was determined to "fight" the Texan judge's decision, which he described as an "unprecedented" attempt to deprive women of fundamental freedoms.
A position that was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris: "We are with the women of the United States."
“Allowing the courts and politicians to tell the FDA what to do is contrary to good public health policy,” she said when she arrived in Tennessee on an official trip.
Mifepristone, she recalled, received approval from the health authorities twenty years ago and since then "has been shown to be safe."
The Texan judge's order, she stressed, represents "a dangerous precedent."