A doctors group filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court today asking it to uphold the ruling from a federal appeals court that banned mail-order abortions and protects women from dangerous abortion pills.
As LifeNews reported previously, in April the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that banned mail-order abortions that put women’s lives at risk, condemned the improper FDA approval process for the drug and restored strict limits on the drug meant to protect women’s health that the Biden administration removed.
By illegally approving chemical abortion drugs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women. The FDA never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use, ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls, disregarded the substantial evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause more complications than surgical abortions, and eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant girls and women who undergo this dangerous drug regimen.
The appellate court said the FDA’s faulty decision to approve the abortion drug could stand because too much time had passed since it was approved — even if that approval process was problematic.
The maker of the dangerous aboriton drug appealed along with the Biden administration.
Today, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a legal brief for a doctors group, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, asking the nation’s highest court to reject that appeal.
The brief asks the high court to deny the Biden administration’s and Danco Laboratories’ request for the court to hear the case and instead let stand the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s ruling that restored critical safeguards for chemical abortion drugs.
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“Every court so far has agreed that the FDA acted unlawfully in removing crucial safeguards for women and authorizing dangerous mail-order abortions,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley told LifeNews today.
“The FDA’s recent actions on chemical abortion drugs have harmed the health of women and undermined the rule of law by unlawfully removing every meaningful safeguard from the chemical abortion drug regimen. The FDA, like any federal agency, is required to rationally explain its decisions. Yet its unprecedented actions here did not reflect scientific judgment but rather a politically-driven decision to push a dangerous drug regimen without regard to women’s health. We are urging the Supreme Court to deny the Biden administration’s request to overrule the decision of the 5th Circuit,” Hawley added.
The brief explains how the administration’s and Danco’s petitions wrongly insinuate that the lower court’s decision takes mifepristone off the market when it does not.
The brief notes that, “the modest decision [from the 5th Circuit] merely restores the common-sense safeguards under which millions of women have taken chemical abortion drugs. Women will still have access to chemical abortion under the same protections that existed for the first 16 years of mifepristone’s use, including crucial examinations and ongoing monitoring for complications by a prescribing physician…. If this litigation involved a drug unrelated to abortion, there would not even be a debate as to whether this Court should intervene mid-litigation stream.”
In its ruling this Spring, the three judge panel also said that it was not to late for the doctors challenging the FDA approval to move forward with their concerns about the moves in 2016 by the Obama administration to remove all important safety regulations on the abortion pill. Additionally, in 2016, the FDA extended the permissible gestational age of the baby for which a girl or woman may take chemical abortion drugs—from seven weeks’ gestation to 10 weeks’ gestation. The 5th Circuit’s order moved that back to seven weeks’ gestation, protecting the mother from adverse complications that increase with gestational age, reinstated necessary doctor visits, and brought back the requirement that abortionists must check women for complications after their chemical abortions.
The 5th Circuit also agreed with Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys that the FDA’s approval of generic mifepristone was unlawful, and that the manufacturer must cease production by Friday.
“The FDA put politics ahead of the health of women and girls when it impermissibly failed to study how dangerous the chemical abortion drug regimen is and when it unlawfully removed every meaningful safeguard that it previously implemented. The FDA should have to answer for the damage it has done to the rule of law and the harm it has caused to countless women and girls,” said ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley.
She told LifeNews, “Federal agencies that act lawlessly must be held accountable. The FDA illegally approved dangerous chemical abortion drugs and has evaded its legal responsibility to answer the American people’s questions for two decades. The 5th Circuit’s decision is a significant victory for the doctors we represent, women’s health, and every American who deserves an accountable federal government acting within the bounds of the law.”
The appeals court did not evaluate all of the safety arguments in the case, but it said that the F.D.A. “cannot deny that serious complications from mifepristone” occur. The court also said that the F.D.A. was incorrect in saying that mifepristone was comparable in safety to ibuprofen. “F.D.A.’s own documents show that mifepristone bears no resemblance to ibuprofen.”
In its decision, the 5th Circuit ruled that abortionists are no longer allowed to send chemical abortion drugs through the mail, which the FDA had been allowing since 2021, in direct violation of longstanding federal law. The appeals court agreed that the Comstock Act prohibits mailing abortion drugs and it said the doctors who brought the case had legal standing because they had treated so many women injured by abortion drugs.
The appeals court said that “as a result of F.D.A.’s failure to regulate this potent drug, these doctors have had to devote significant time and resources to caring for women experiencing mifepristone’s harmful effects. This harm is sufficiently concrete.”
Since the rulng, a Nevada woman has died following a botched abortion at Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion business.
Alyona Dixon, 24, died on September 28, 2022 after complications from the abortion forced her to seek emergency medical treatment four days after the abortion at Planned Parenthood. Her family is now suing the Las Vegas hospital that treated her, saying it did not provide adequate medical care for the abortion complications.
At the Planned Parenthood abortion center, Dixon received the dangerous mifepristone abortion pill that has killed dozens of other women and injured thousands. The pill has been linked to sepsis, which has killed other women taking the abortion drug, including Dixon.
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