I have been following the mifepristone case pretty closely. It is amazing to think that all conservative groups have to do in this country is continually shop their cases to one podunk right wing judge's district in Amarillo, Texas and the rules will apply to the whole country.
Imagine the hew and cry if the tables were turned? On, lets, say, assault weapons?
In any case, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar made some very good points yesterday. The plaintiff in this case actually has no standing. They really don't have a horse in the race.
She said the group of antiabortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in Kacsmaryk’s court should never have been granted legal standing, because their interests are not implicated.
“They neither take nor prescribe mifepristone, and FDA’s approval of the drug does not require them to do or refrain from doing anything,” Prelogar wrote. “Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the associations have standing because some of their members might be asked to treat women who are prescribed mifepristone by other providers and who then suffer an exceedingly rare adverse event. This Court has squarely rejected that statistical approach.”
Last June, the court majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization said it was attempting to “heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
So much for that.
I thought her point was well made. The Christian doctor's group who brought the suit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, neither takes nor dispenses the drug so perhaps they should butt out of a woman's own decision making process. Isn't it a Hippa violation to interfere in another doctor's relationship with their patient?
She continued:
“Public health authorities around the world have likewise approved mifepristone, and the World Health Organization has included it on a list of ‘Essential Medicines.’”
She said the court of appeals judges “badly misread” documents about its safety and said the number of patients who might require emergency care after a medication abortion is “extremely low.”
Moreover, Prelogar wrote, “As of June 2022, only 28 deaths had been reported among the more than 5 million women who have taken mifepristone, and some of them had obvious alternative causes — including homicide, drug overdose, and other factors entirely unrelated to mifepristone.”
I decided to take a deeper dive into the issue of standing and found Adam Unikowsky's excellent legal blog. It is a serious read and not suitable for the casual browse but tells you more about the issue of standing than you will ever want to know.
Mifepristone and the rule of law
It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides to do in the wake of two different opinions. My bet is for the worst but I hope that I am wrong. They have their collective foot on the American neck, not to mention uterus and are doing the bidding of Leonard Leo and their Federalist Society leaders. I have absolutely no faith that they will consider the expressed opinion of the majority of Americans who wish to make their own personal reproductive decisions.
6 comments:
There is a six-year statute of limitations for challenging an FDA action, like its approval of mifepristone. AHM's suit is too late. That is, even if we assume that AHM is challenging the FDA's 2016 petition denial (instead of its 2000 approval of mifepristone), the statute of limitations on that claim ran in March 2022, and AHM's suit was not filed until November.
ja
The GOP is against birth control and abortions. Instead, they wait until the kids are in school……..and then give the NRA the power.
ln
You're missing the point on all of this. It's very simple. It's about...wait for it...
MONEY.
The forces arrayed against the casual application of abortion, which is the norm, don't really care that your fetus is terminated and left on the sidewalk of life. No, they just don't want all of the U.S. of A. to pay for it. We have a Hyde Amendment that states that no Federal dollars will go to the abortion industrial complex. But singly each state can abort their young with great prejudice at their leisure.
But just to point out the obvious to anyone that has bothered to look, we don't have red and blue states. There are no blue states. We have all red states and isolated blue cities, rather like medieval fortresses with moats that pull up the drawbridge when Conservative forces venture near. A look at the map of voting in counties in EVERY state is a vast sea of red. With tiny little islands of blue in urban areas.
If the population on those islands are great enough then they rule that state, and then they are called blue. If just the California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois representatives in Congress were suddenly shut out of the halls of legislation the result would be to put the notion of Liberalism on the ash heap of history.
Ronald R. Reagan
Bullshit. It is about theological control.
I like your use of the King's English. It suits you.
Dan'l Webster
Coming from a guy that signs off as ballsack, I appreciate that.
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