The US Department of Justice has filed an appeal against a Texas judge’s decision to suspend approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
The U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision to put the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion drug mifepristone on hold has thrown future access to the medication into question nationwide and has laid the foundation for a high-stakes Supreme Court battle.
Lawyers for the Biden administration have called the ruling “misguided” and said it risked women’s health by blocking access to a pill long cleared as safe.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling has halted the authorisation of the drug but has given the government seven days to appeal.
Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee who earlier in his career represented a Christian conservative legal group that sued the federal government, challenging the part of the Affordable Care Act that required employers to provide free insurance coverage for birth control.
According to the BBC, Mifepristone has been used for most US abortions for the last 20 years, but the recent developments have heralded a legal showdown that could cause the biggest blow to abortion access since the country’s top court ruled last summer that there was no nationwide right to terminate a pregnancy. The pill is still available for now.
Source: The Independent
On Monday, the justice department filed an emergency motion, seeking to temporarily block last Friday’s ruling in Amarillo, Texas. Biden administration lawyers have asked for a decision by 13 April 13—one day before the lower court’s decision is set to take effect.
The government said Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “especially unwarranted” because it would subvert the scientific judgement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which authorises medication in the US. The government’s motion, if successful, would preserve mifepristone’s approval until an appeal can be heard before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen that induces abortions. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone in the body and is used with the drug misoprostol to end pregnancy within the first 10 weeks. The lawsuit in the Texas case was filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. The ADF argued that the FDA, in its four-year approval process, had ignored the potential impacts of mifepristone on the developing bodies of adolescent girls.
Kacsmaryk is a former federal prosecutor and lawyer for the conservative First Liberty Institute. He was confirmed in 2019 over fierce opposition by Democrats due to his record opposing LGBTQ rights. He was among more than 230 judges installed on the federal bench under Trump and has ruled against the Biden administration on several other issues, including immigration and LGBTQ protections.
Kacsmaryk has in the past sided with Texas in ruling against Biden’s administration guidance that said employers can’t block workers from using a bathroom consistent with their gender identity and has ruled that allowing minors to obtain free birth control without parental consent at federally funded clinics violated parental rights and Texas law.
According to the Associated Press (AP), Kacsmaryk’s detractors said his past writings and legal work revealed extremist views towards gay and transgender people. In articles before being nominated, he wrote critically of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which established a nationwide right to an abortion, and the Obergefell decision, which legalised same-sex marriage nationally.
In 2015, he slammed an effort to pass federal gender identity and sexual orientation protections, writing that doing so would “give no quarter to Americans who continue to believe and seek to exercise their millennia-old religious belief that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman,” the AP reported.
The senior judge has also described as a delusion the view that one can be trapped in the body of the wrong sex.
Kacsmaryk joined the First Liberty Institute in 2014. He defended an Oregon bakery that refused to provide a cake for a same sex-couple’s wedding while serving as the institute’s deputy general counsel.
“Obviously, his decisions have been really disappointing to progressives and left-leaning folks and have been very pleasing to those on the right,” Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative judicial advocacy group, was quoted as saying by the AP.
“But that’s kind of the nature of our judicial branch right now, especially with these hot-button issues,” he said.
