According to a new Politico report, a major abortion drug manufacturer wants to thwart state efforts to protect unborn babies from abortion by filing lawsuits to challenge their restrictions on the drug.
GenBioPro is already challenging a Mississippi law restricting the abortion drug mifepristone, and it plans to sue other pro-life states soon, a company attorney told Politico.
The Mississippi law is “an unauthorized attempt by Mississippi to establish its drug approval policies and directly regulate drug availability in the state,” the GenBioPro lawsuit states, Reason reports.
Ken Parsigian of the law firm Latham & Watkins, which represents the drugmaker, said they believe states should be required to follow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s provisions on mifepristone.
“The FDA has determined that it is safe, effective, and in the interest of public health that this drug is very readily available,” Parisian said. “We’re going to push for it because this is much more important to many women than it was a week ago.”
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Mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. It blocks the hormone progesterone and starves the baby to death. For decades, the FDA required that abortionists provide the drug in person after a medical examination because of its high risks.
In December, however, the Biden administration abolished the personal requirement and began selling the drug through the mail. Now women — or their abusers — can buy the abortion drug online without ever seeing or talking to a doctor.
In response, Mississippi and several other states have passed laws banning mail-order abortion drugs and requiring mifepristone to be dispensed in person by a physician.
Lawmakers pointed to studies showing that the risks of the abortion drug are far more common than abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 requiring hospital treatment. A recent study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that the number of abortion-related emergency room visits by women using the abortion drug increased by more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015.
However, the Biden administration believes mail-order abortion drugs are one way America can continue to abort unborn babies, even in states that protect their lives by law.
In response to the Supreme Court’s quashing of Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden pledged Friday to ensure that the abortion drug mifepristone remains as widely available to women as possible.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland also mentioned the abortion drug on Friday, saying they should not “ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment on its safety and efficacy.”
Here’s more from Politico:
Some abortion rights lawyers argue that the FDA should argue that its drug approval decisions prejudge actions by states to restrict or ban the use of mifepristone. The notion of preemption, which stems from the Constitution’s supremacy clause, says that federal law supersedes state law when the two conflict. †
Parsigian said he is unaware of the Justice Department’s legal strategy regarding access to abortion medications but noted that Garland’s statement was consistent with GenBioPro’s argument in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.
“If [Garland had] called our suit by name, it would have fit well with what he said,” Parisian said. “We’re doing what he said they wanted to do.”
Abortion drugs are big business. Mifepristone is now used for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. In 2020, the drug was responsible for 54 percent of all abortion-related deaths of unborn babies, up from 39 percent in 2017, the pro-abortion research group found.
The FDA has linked the abortion drug to at least 26 deaths among women and 4,000 serious complications between 2000 and 2018. However, under President Barack Obama, the FDA has stopped requiring nonfatal complications from mifepristone to be reported. So the numbers are almost certainly much higher.
LifeNews recently published an article highlighting eight facts every woman should know about abortion drugs.