A federal judge in Texas will hold a hearing on Wednesday in a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pills used in medication abortions.
The coalition of anti-abortion groups behind the suit, called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, has requested a preliminary injunction to take one of the two drugs, mifepristone, off the market nationwide while the case proceeds.
That request is the focus of Wednesday’s hearing, scheduled for 9 a.m. local time, though it is not known when U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will issue his decision — it could come Wednesday or in the following days or weeks.
More than half of women who terminate their pregnancies in the U.S. do so via medication abortion. If access to mifepristone is halted, those seeking an abortion, and their providers, would have to choose between a surgical procedure or taking the other medication in the regimen, misoprostol, off-label on its own.
The lawsuit, filed in November, alleges that the FDA did not adequately evaluate mifepristone’s safety before it approved the drug in 2000, and also argues the agency should not have made the medication accessible via telehealth during the pandemic.
But the Biden administration argues the group doesn’t have the legal standing to bring the lawsuit. That’s one of the issues Kacsmaryk has told the lawyers to prepare to address in the hearing, along with the potential harm of halting access to mifepristone and the implications of implementing such an order nationwide.
There is little legal precedent for a court to overturn a longstanding FDA approval, but abortion providers are nonetheless bracing for the possibility that Kacsmaryk — who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump — will grant the injunction request, since the judge has historically taken conservative stances on abortion rights and other issues.
Erik Baptist, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal…
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