U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision to put the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone on hold has thrown future access to medication abortion into question nationwide and laid the foundation for a high-stakes Supreme Court battle.
The ruling, issued Friday, is set to go into effect at the end of this week unless a higher court intervenes. The Justice Department asked an appeals court to block it Monday.
In interviews, several legal and medical experts said Kacsmaryk’s decision was unprecedented and clearly ideological. His language and reasoning, they said, closely mirrored arguments and concepts put forward by the anti-abortion movement — at the expense of scientific consensus in some instances.
The experts pointed to several key examples of the extreme nature of Kacsmaryk’s 67-page ruling, including his use of politicized terminology and apparent endorsement of the contentious idea of “fetal personhood.” Here are the parts of the ruling experts found most striking.
Charged terminology: ‘chemical abortion’ and ‘unborn human’
Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, earlier in his career represented a Christian conservative legal group that sued the federal government challenging the part of the Affordable Care Act that required employers to provide free insurance coverage for birth control.
In his ruling Friday, Kacsmaryk used various terms closely associated with the anti-abortion movement, according to the experts who were interviewed. Notably, Kacsmaryk referred to the two-pill regimen that is the most common way to terminate a pregnancy in the U.S. as “chemical abortion,” rather than “medication abortion.” The plaintiffs in the suit, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, use the same term in their filings and messaging.
“‘Chemical abortion’ is absolutely not a scientific or medical term. It is something that has been utilized and propagated by those who want to ban abortion or restrict abortion,”…
Read the full article here