Anti-abortion groups have submitted a filing urging the United States Supreme Court to restrict the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone, challenging the medication’s federal approval and asking the justices to implement the curbs ordered by a conservative judge in Texas.
On Tuesday, the challengers called on the Supreme Court to reject emergency requests by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration and the pill’s manufacturer to halt the preliminary injunction issued on April 7 by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
That injunction, issued in a federal court in Amarillo, Texas, would greatly limit mifepristone’s distribution while litigation proceeds.
In a ruling on April 12, the New Orleans-based Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block certain restrictions but halted a part of Kacsmaryk’s order that would have suspended approval of the drug by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), effectively pulling it off the market.
The FDA is the US agency that signs off on the safety of food products, drugs and medical devices. It approved mifepristone in 2000.
“The only effect of the lower court’s order is to restore a modicum of safety for the women and girls who use the drug, including supervision and oversight by a physician,” lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious rights group representing the pill’s challengers, wrote in the filing.
The FDA and mifepristone maker Danco Laboratories have for years disregarded “holes and red flags” in their safety data, “demonstrating callous disregard for women’s well-being, unborn life and statutory limits”, the lawyers said.
The FDA asserts that mifepristone is safe and effective, a record that it has said is conclusively demonstrated over decades of use by millions of Americans. Adverse effects of mifepristone are exceedingly rare, it says.
The case poses another major threat to abortion rights in the US, after the Supreme Court’s decision last June to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had legalised the procedure nationwide. Mounting abortion bans and restrictions have been enacted by Republican-led states since then.
Mifepristone is taken with another drug called misoprostol to perform medication abortion, which now accounts for more than half of all US abortions.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the June ruling, temporarily blocked the restrictions on mifepristone last Friday in order to give…