Woke Activist Judge Seeks to Ban Abortion Pill Nationally

I saw they are being represented by the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom

all these doctors should be ashamed of themselves

once u start mixing religion and medicine, you’re lost…and then u want to place your religious beliefs on the rest of the country

fck u

 

This is what should be the biggest story right now. Absolutely insane the gall with the Republican party to actually rig the courts to full ban abortion at this level.

This is likely what 2024 is going to be about. If Trump is the nominee, and it looks like he is regardless of indictments, Biden has to make Trump own what he has done here, and make a case to the American people what it means to vote Republican at any level.

This party has lost any semblance of compromise on their ideology, and is openly touting the type of autocratic behavior we see in Communist China where freedoms simply do not exist for the Populus. The Right Wing Supreme Court is trying to stand up themselves as an Ayatollah type of ruling body that uses corrupt autocrats like Trump to maintain the power to subjugate the population.

Lets be honest about who really is trying to run the show here in the US. Clarence Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Beer Bong Brett, Amy C, and the billionaires that put them in their positions. No way in hell this judge in Texas does this without knowing how these 5 are going to rule.

If Democracy is going to survive, the Democratic voters are going to have to show up with enough force for multiple election cycles to get control of Congress long enough to freaking delude the power of these self-ordained right wing looneys trying to subjugate the country.

 

Long article covers everything except the argument being made to the court as to why the drug should be pulled.

 

This is the scary truth! Even scarier, is Mr. Right wing DeSantis would embrace it even more!

 

If anyone else was curious about the rationale of the suit, here is a press release about it from the Catholic Medical Association (linked from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine website): CMA Opposes FDA Decision Allowing Retail and Mail Order Abortion Pills - Catholic Medical Association : Catholic Medical Association (cathmed.org)

Also, an article from Reason/Volokh (fair warning) assessing that the merit of the suit is poor as a matter of administrative law: Assessing the Legal Claims in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA (reason.com).

 

But...but that sounds awfully close to an (GASP!) agenda.

Only liberals have agendas!!

 

I remember driving from Houston to northern Arizona in September 2020. Wifey and I had gone through Windmill Alley on I-40; we were near Amarillo (home of this judge ruling on the case). I thought, You know, you could have just let the Comanche keep this part of Texas, there ain't s**t here.

Stopped to fuel up. We were clearly in Trump country. Yes, we were in our pickup truck (once you go truck, you never go back), but I wore my mask to go into the convenience store thinking everyone around me would turn and point at me, doing that "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" shrieking howl.

 

It definitely seems like this would be a massive judicial overreach for the judge to ban the drug altogether as noted in the link above:
“The authority to withdraw a drug resides with the FDA commissioner who makes that decision based on scientific evidence on the drug’s safety and efficacy, they said. The manufacturer, in this case Danco Laboratories, is also supposed to get a hearing during the process.”

That said as we’ve seen recently issues of precedent and other legal reasoning have frequently taken a back seat to ideology.

 

Isn’t that the GOP in a nutshell? Compromise morals to attain results.

These doctors should lose their medical licenses. They can still practice apologetic reasoning medicine for their fellow cult members.

 

Sounds like CMA is saying that while the safety of the drug may not have changed, giving it to people my mail so that they are taking it outside the supervision of a doctor is unsafe. I can appreciate that argument, but the solution is to liberalize abortion, not to further restrict it.

 

That is a reasonable argument but one of the remedies being asked for and possible is for the judge to completely ban the drug.

That seems like a major leap in judicial reasoning.

 

Ok, but the court hasn't ruled yet. Plaintiffs will always ask for the moon first and still be happy to get only half. You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take, and all that. Not sure we should bother being offended by the demands of rando plaintiffs. I'll keep my outrage in reserve in case the judge actually rules in some dumb kind of way.

 

Even so, courts have no business determining safety. Now if there was some process failure in the rulemaking process then that's a potential path to strike down a regulation but to rule on the merits of whether a drug is safe or unsafe via mail is ridiculous overreach. Once the courts allow themselves to start reviewing pharmaceutical safety, we'll get a flood of litigation around FDA authorizations.

 

From what I understand of the case (which is dangerous because this is some byzantine administrative law stuff and I'm not a lawyer), they want the court to issue a temporary injunction on the distribution of this drug and order the FDA to re-open the regulatory review process for this drug. But the review was done 20 years ago and its done and finished and the statute of limitations on challenges is expired. The suit wants to argue that an exception should be made because the FDA made a change, not in the drug, but in how the drug can be delivered to patients that is significant enough that regulatory review is necessary. In other words, they are suing essentially over regulatory process matters and not over safety matters. Safety comes up because they want the court to decide that an injunction on the distribution of the drug is necessary while the regulatory issues are rehashed. If the judge finds in their favor and even if an injunction is upheld by higher courts, it still doesn't take control away from the FDA from making the ultimate decision on safety -- worst case, it forces FDA to open a new docket on whether the drug is safe and effective. And, its possible that such a review concludes while a Republican sits in the White House and can appoint an FDA commissioner who will make sure the drug does not pass that review.

But I think this is mostly a media panic and nothing very bad will happen. From what I've read, the standing of the plaintiffs is weak, their argument is weak, and perhaps more importantly their arguments runs counter to the legal philosophies that conservative judges prefer. But media can leverage our bias against Trump-appointed judges and against Texans and our fear of the conservative Supreme Court to get clicks.