In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the chemical abortion drug. In 2022, a group of concerned healthcare professionals sued the FDA for its negligence in establishing safeguards prior to its approval of the drug. On Thursday, however, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the suit. The FDA will continue its approval of the dangerous abortion drug, and women and babies will remain in harm's way.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys represented the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, three other medical associations and individual doctors in a lawsuit against the FDA after insisting that the FDA is endangering women and girls. The doctors cited side effects of the drug including; ectopic pregnancies, severe bleeding, and life-threatening infections and noted. They also cited concerns over the fact that the FDA does not require these dangerous drugs to be taken at a doctors office. Women can take them alone at home or in their dorm room. Thirdly, the doctors noted that physicians should be required to report all serious complications from these drugs. As it stands now, they do not have to.
A few months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the FDA did in fact act unlawfully with its removal of the necessary and important safety standards, and the case got moved up to the Supreme Court for review. This step was promising and the pro-life movement seemed hopeful on March 26, when oral arguments were held.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that they would not reinstate any of the safeguards for the abortion pill. Due to this, the abortion pill will remain widely acceptable and will continue putting innocent babies and women at risk.
In response to the decision, pro-life individuals and groups were heartbroken and terrified for women and babies.
“While we’re disappointed the Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s unlawful actions, nothing in today’s decision changes this fact: women and girls are being harmed by the FDA’s recklessness. We will continue to advocate for women’s health and expose the careless actions of the FDA and the harms of abortion drugs,” ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley said in a statement.
The Heritage Foundation’s Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow, and Melanie Israel, a visiting fellow, said the following about SCOTUS’ decision:
Today's decision is not the final judgment on the safety or effectiveness of mifepristone, which we know is unsafe for women and causes up to 1 in 22 women to end up in the emergency room.
While legal technicalities might allow Biden’s FDA to continue manipulating its safety rules to push a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of health and common sense, women and girls taking these chemical abortion drugs are still in danger and largely left to fend for themselves.
Policymakers should be on the side of women’s safety by, at a minimum, demanding that the FDA follow its own original safety guidelines, not give abortion drugs a pass because of radical abortion ideology.
March for Life President Jeanne Mancini felt similarly. She noted her disappointment in the decision and said, “The agency’s reckless removal of nearly all safeguards surrounding the drug — like the care of a medical provider and the requirement for prescribers to report medical emergencies — is unacceptable, and the FDA’s own label on mifepristone shows that roughly 1 in 25 women are forced to go to in the emergency room because of horrific complications.”
“The abortion pill crisis will continue, as almost 2,000 children are killed by this method every single day. The Supreme Court cannot ignore this forever,” Lila Rose, president of Live Action wrote on her X account.
What this shows is that even though SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade back in 2022, the fight for life and safety for women and girls is far from over.
