The tortuous judicial Way of the Cross undertaken on Good Friday by mifepristone, the popular abortion drug, passed through the station of the Supreme Court this Wednesday, which has ordered provisionally maintaining full unrestricted access to the abortion pill mifepristone until midnight on Friday.
It extends a term that expired this Wednesday and it is expected that in these two extra days it will make a more permanent decision.
The matter had reached the highest judicial instance in the country last week thanks to an appeal by the Joe Biden Administration and Danco Laboratories, New York-based manufacturers of Mifeprex, the most popular commercial brand.
Both called for intervention to avoid "regulatory chaos."
And the truth is that, like almost everything that has to do with the American judicial system, the mess was considerable, after Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative federal magistrate from Texas, decided on April 7 in Amarillo to suspend the administration of the mifepristone and give a period of seven days for the entry into force of this prohibition.
That period was used by the Department of Justice to appeal the decision, which agreed with a recently created anti-abortion group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that denounced the US Drug Agency (FDA) for having approved 23 years ago the use of mifepristone without, they maintained, sufficient guarantees.
Combined with another pill, misoprostol, the drug in question is used in about half of all medical abortions in the United States.
That same day, on the other side of the country, a parallel decision by a Washington state judge was made public that contradicted Kacsmaryk's by ordering that access to mifepristone be maintained in the 17 states whose Democratic attorneys general, fearing the worst They had filed a preventive lawsuit.
The outcome of both resolutions sowed considerable confusion among doctors, patients, pharmaceutical companies, and pro- and anti-abortion activists.
The appeal of the Texas decision ended up before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which, based in New Orleans, is in charge of ordering the traffic of the contested sentences in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi.
That intermediate instance adopted three precautionary measures while deciding on the merits of the matter: it prohibited its use after the seventh week of pregnancy, and vetoed its administration by mail or without a prior visit to the doctor.
The FDA approved in 2000 the administration of mifepristone with a medical prescription during the first seven weeks from the moment of conception, which became 10 in 2016. In 2021, the Joe Biden Administration made the possibility of receiving the prescription permanent by mail and without having to see a doctor, after trying that practice during the pandemic to avoid unnecessary visits to the doctor.
On its website, it can be read that the agency "does not recommend buying mifepristone online", despite the fact that many women obtain it that way, with senders from Russia or India.
Faced with these restrictions, which should have entered into force last Saturday, the Department of Justice and the pharmaceutical company appealed to the Supreme Court.
In the distribution established between its nine magistrates (six conservatives and three liberals), the court of appeals for the Fifth Circuit reports directly to Samuel Alito, one of the most right-wing members of the group.
It was this one who asked for time until midnight this Wednesday to make a decision and the same one that he has kicked forward until Friday.
As it happens, Alito wrote the ruling that last year overturned the
Roe v. Wade ruling,
which in 1973 gave federal protection to the right to abortion.
When this precedent was repealed, the power to regulate on the subject remained in the hands of the states.
A total of 18 have prohibited or severely restricted that right.
In several more, there are laws in this regard that have already been challenged and are waiting for the respective state Supreme Courts to rule.
That historic victory did not stop the aspirations of the anti-abortion movement in the United States, which, after leaving vast areas of the country, mainly in the Deep South, turned into deserts for women's freedom to decide, set itself the next goal of ending pills .
In the cocktail that comes from ingesting mifepristone and misoprostol in that order, the first stops the production of progesterone and interrupts the pregnancy, while the second serves to evacuate the patient's uterus.
At the heart of the Texas lawsuit is the allegation that the FDA's initial approval of mifepristone was flawed because the agency failed to adequately review safety risks.
Mifepristone has been used by 5.2 million women in the past 23 years, according to agency estimates.
The most common side effects of mifepristone include cramps, bleeding, nausea, headache, and diarrhea.
Very rarely, women can experience excessive bleeding that requires surgery to stop it.
Beyond these contraindications, around a hundred scientific studies carried out in the last two decades have coincided in concluding that the pills are a safe method of terminating a pregnancy.