ADF to Supreme Court: Deny Biden admin's request to remove safeguards for chemical abortion drugs

The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, vice president of the Center for Life and regulatory practice, regarding a brief in opposition ADF attorneys filed with the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The brief asks the high court to deny the Biden administration’s and Danco Laboratories’ request for the court to hear the case and instead let stand the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s ruling that restored critical safeguards for chemical abortion drugs:

“Every court so far has agreed that the FDA acted unlawfully in removing crucial safeguards for women and authorizing dangerous mail-order abortions. The FDA’s recent actions on chemical abortion drugs have harmed the health of women and undermined the rule of law by unlawfully removing every meaningful safeguard from the chemical abortion drug regimen. The FDA, like any federal agency, is required to rationally explain its decisions. Yet its unprecedented actions here did not reflect scientific judgment but rather a politically-driven decision to push a dangerous drug regimen without regard to women’s health. We are urging the Supreme Court to deny the Biden administration’s request to overrule the decision of the 5th Circuit.”

The brief explains how the administration’s and Danco’s petitions wrongly insinuate that the lower court’s decision takes mifepristone off the market when it does not. The brief notes that, “the modest decision [from the 5th Circuit] merely restores the common-sense safeguards under which millions of women have taken chemical abortion drugs. Women will still have access to chemical abortion under the same protections that existed for the first 16 years of mifepristone’s use, including crucial examinations and ongoing monitoring for complications by a prescribing physician…. If this litigation involved a drug unrelated to abortion, there would not even be a debate as to whether this Court should intervene mid-litigation stream.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

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