When a judge in Texas issued his ruling invalidating the FDA’s approval of abortion pill mifepristone on April 8th, Karen Keiser ’69, MSJ ’73 was outraged.
“It was ridiculous,” the Washington State Senator said, “that a federal judge having no medical information and accessing no information that was available to him just [ruled] based on legal fiction, in my opinion.”
Mifepristone is one of two pills that are used in over half of the abortions in the United States. Rolling back the drug’s approval, after 23 years, could make getting an abortion difficult even in states where the procedure is still legal.
In his ruling, Trump-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, wrote that that “women who have aborted a child — especially through chemical abortion drugs that necessitate the woman seeing her aborted child once it passes — often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse and suicidal thoughts because of the abortion.” He argued that the FDA had improperly approved the drug and that it should no longer be on the market. The FDA has strongly disputed this argument, pointing to over 100 studies showing the safety of mifepristone and that the rate of serious complications is less than that of childbirth (0.3 percent compared with 1.4 percent).