USA – ‘Rolling Thunder’: Inside conservatives’ strategy to curb abortion pill access

Planned Parenthood Action Fund

Marjorie Dannenfelser

Marty Makary

mifepristone

Planned Parenthood

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RollingThunder

Ryan Anderson

safety of abortion pills

Students for Life

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

United States

Activism

Anti-choice

USA – The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
MARCH 25, 2024

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case that could determine national access to mifepristone, one of two pills used as part of medication abortion. In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Carrie N. Baker, whose book, History and Politics of Abortion Pills in the United States, is being published by Amherst College Press this year.

Lithwick and Baker discussed the anti-abortion movement’s decadeslong efforts to target the abortion pill, how those efforts hampered FDA approval of the medication in the first place, and how having easier access to reproductive care through a pill that can be sent in the mail and taken at home fundamentally threatens the strategy of those seeking to dismantle abortion rights in this country. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/abortion-pill-supreme-court-preview-mifepristone-history.html

Abortion pill maker sues FDA to preserve access

The lawsuit from GenBioPro, which makes the generic version of the drug, comes as SCOTUS action looms.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
04/19/2023

The company that makes the generic version of a common abortion pill sued the FDA on Wednesday, hoping to bar the agency from rolling back access to the drug if the Supreme Court allows sweeping restrictions to take effect this week.

The challenge filed in federal court in Maryland, where the agency is headquartered, argues that if the FDA implements a court order suspending approval of the drug, mifepristone, it would be “depriving GenBioPro of its constitutional and statutory rights to market mifepristone without affording GenBioPro due process of law.”

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/19/abortion-pill-maker-sues-fda-to-preserve-access-00092810

19.04.2023

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

abortion pills

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic-lawmakers-abortion-pill-ruling-letter_n_64393cb0e4b0ac40918ac299

Democratic Lawmakers Blast Abortion Pill Ruling In Scathing Letter

Nearly 600 legislators from 49 states signed the letter attacking the "dangerous" ruling by a Trump-appointed judge to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone.

By Kevin Robillard
Apr 14, 2023

Nearly 600 Democratic state legislators have signed on to a letter protesting a federal judge’s ruling revoking FDA approval of mifepristone, saying the “health and wellbeing of our constituents that we were put into office to protect is at grave risk.”

The 588 legislators [now 621] who signed come from every state except North Dakota, a sign of how the party views promoting access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs involved in medication abortion, and defending the Food and Drug Administration from political interference as a winning issue even in conservative areas.

14.04.2023

State Innovation Exchange

Gretchen Whitmer

Jennifer Driver

Julie von Haefen

Texas abortion pill ruling could undermine U.S. FDA, experts say

By Ahmed Aboulenein, Reuters
Posted April 10, 2023

A federal judge’s decision last week to suspend the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of abortion pill mifepristone could severely weaken the agency if allowed to stand, health policy and legal experts said.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling on Friday, which followed a March 15 hearing, was a preliminary injunction that would essentially ban sales of mifepristone while the case by anti-abortion groups before him continues in the Northern District of Texas.

Continued: https://globalnews.ca/news/9612569/texas-abortion-pill-us-fda/

10.04.2023

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-latest-attack-on-the-abortion-pill-is-forty-years-in-the-making

Kaiser Family Foundation

The Latest Attack on the Abortion Pill Is Forty Years in the Making

If a Texas lawsuit prevails, mifepristone will no longer be available anywhere in the nation, even in states where abortion is legal.

By Sue Halpern, The New Yorker
March 9, 2023

In 1987, Ms. magazine asked me to write about RU-486, a new medication that caused the uterus to expel a fertilized egg before it could gestate. It wasn’t a contraceptive, but it wasn’t what most people considered an abortion, either. At the time, anti-abortion campaigners were brandishing ultrasound images that purported to show fetuses crying out in pain as they were being surgically removed. RU-486, which was developed in France but not yet available in the United States, threatened to stymie this tactic: there would be no fetal development to flaunt. Even the president of the National Right to Life Committee acknowledged that there was little P.R. value in images of what appeared to be menstruating women. This disarming of the pro-life movement, and the drug’s seemingly benign effect, I wrote, “may serve to decimate the ranks of abortion foes.” Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the primary developer of RU-486, which is better known as mifepristone, was even more hopeful. With this drug, he declared, abortion “should more or less disappear as a concept, as a fact, as a word in the future.”

Judge extends deadline in lawsuit seeking to pull abortion pill mifepristone from U.S. until Feb. 24

FRI, FEB 10 2023
Spencer Kimball

A federal judge in Texas has extended until Feb. 24 the deadline in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Thursday ordered one of the companies that makes the pill, Danco Laboratories, to lay out its opposition to the attempt to pull the medication from the U.S. market. The anti-abortion physicians who originally filed the lawsuit then have until Feb. 24 to reply.

Continued: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/10/abortion-pill-judge-extends-deadline-in-lawsuit-seeking-to-pull-medication-from-us.html

10.02.2023

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

abortion pills

Danco Laboratories