Supreme Court allowing abortion pill restrictions could be utter chaos
MSNBCApr 19, 2023
The US Supreme Court on Friday ruled that mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill, would remain on the market while a lawsuit in a lower court plays out.
The decision to uphold national access to mifepristone means the drug will be widely available — at least in states where abortion is legal and the medication was previously available — for up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy.
Access to mifepristone should never have been in jeopardy in the first place. Unfortunately, lower court judges engaged in outrageous judicial activism, including second-guessing scientific judgments, to limit access to abortion pills used by over 5M women in the US since the FDA's decades-old approval. This case is completely absurd as it rests on the evidence given by anti-abortion doctors, who should have been found to lack standing as they would have been if the case had involved any other drug.
Self-managed abortions constitute murder under strict abortion bans. While it has been on the market for nearly a quarter century, the progesterone blocker mifepristone kills unborn babies by depriving them of nutrients and can have severe repercussions for the mother's health. It is unacceptable that, instead of increasing oversight of the drug, the FDA approved it in violation of its statutory duty, eliminating safeguards and even making it more accessible.
There's an 8% chance that FDA approval of mifepristone for abortion will no longer be in effect for any period of time before July 1, 2023, according to the Metaculus prediction community.