On Friday night, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk erased 23 years of American history in just 67 pages. He determined the Food and Drug Administration did not consider all available scientific evidence when it approved mifepristone, the first of two drugs used in medication abortion, and therefore, he ruled the drug’s approval violated federal regulatory law.
Unless a higher court intervenes by Friday, Kacsmaryk’s order will rewind America’s clock back before the FDA approved mifepristone in September 2000 — and under the guise of a judicial stay, legal mifepristone will become a proverbial pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.
The immediate, real-life implications of Kacsmaryk’s decision are, as University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman wrote for Slate last week, “pure chaos.” Medication abortion already accounts for more than half of all abortions nationwide. But after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, medication abortion was expected to become even more prevalent. Indeed, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last November found that requests for self-managed, medication abortion “surged” after the Supreme Court’s ruling, “with the largest surges seen in states with total or near-total bans on abortion,” in part because access to clinical services has disappeared or is shrinking in those states.
Worse, as multiple and/or adjacent states in certain regions ban abortion, those women who are already more vulnerable to maternal mortality are most at risk. Southern, Black women, for example, both seek abortions and die while pregnant or in childbirth at higher rates than other demographic groups. Meanwhile, the South has become a veritable abortion desert, making Black women even more vulnerable. And even if one can get the second drug used in medication abortion, misoprostol, misoprostol-only abortion is both less effective and has greater side…
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