A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not use proper means to approve the pill responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions. As a result, mifepristone will be suspended from the FDA’s list of approved drugs to initiate chemical abortions.
“Chemical abortion is only the status quo insofar as Defendants’ unlawful actions and their delay in responding to Plaintiffs’ petitions have made it so,” the judge wrote. “The fact that injunctive relief could upset this ‘status quo’ is therefore an insufficient basis to deny injunctive relief.”
For more than two decades, pro-life doctors have repeatedly asked the FDA via citizen petition to repeal its approval of chemical abortion drugs because “the agency violated federal laws by approving these drugs and ignoring the substantial evidence that these drugs harm women and girls.” Despite the FDA’s legal requirement to address these concerns, the agency repeatedly stonewalled petitioners’ requests for years.
Now, 23 years after the FDA rubber-stamped mifepristone, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk decided this week from the Amarillo, Texas federal courthouse that the FDA chose politics over safety in endorsing the widespread use of abortion pills.
“To begin, FDA ‘entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem’ by omitting any evaluation of the psychological effects of the drug or an evaluation of the long term medical consequences of the drug,” Kacsmaryk wrote.
The Biden administration has seven days to appeal the decision to the State Court
