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Abortion Drug Lawsuits Increasingly Filed Across the Country
Twelve states have filed a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claiming that its limits on mifepristone (one of the two drugs used for a medical abortion) are too stringent.
The twelve states include: Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Specifically, the complaint alleges that the mandated Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) imposed on the product are particularly burdensome and create a “paper trail” that documents the patient’s use of mifepristone for the purpose of abortion, potentially putting the patient and provider in danger of violence, harassment, and threats.
“FDA’s decision to continue these burdensome restrictions in January 2023 on a drug that has been on the market for more than two decades with only ‘exceedingly rare’ adverse events has no basis in science,” stated the complaint. “It only serves to make mifepristone harder for doctors to prescribe, harder for pharmacies to fill, harder for patients to access, and more burdensome for the Plaintiff States and their health care providers to dispense.”
Meanwhile, a lawsuit in Texas by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is seeking to compel the FDA to remove mifepristone from the market entirely.
“The FDA’s unlawful actions to approve chemical abortion drugs and remove necessary safeguards have harmed countless women and girls,” states the plaintiff’s most recent legal filing in which it challenges the approval of the medication.
Earlier in February, Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to prevent HHS from requiring pharmacies to fill abortion medication prescriptions. The complaint takes aim at the HHS guidance document for pharmacies that was issued after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. The lawsuit claims that ‘forcing’ pharmacies to dispense abortion-inducing medications as a condition of receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds is a violation of state law and usurps pharmacies’ duties to comply with Texas law. The state is seeking to have the pharmacy guidance vacated and prevent enforcement of it.
The next several months will be telling as some of these cases get decided. I expect to see more cases about abortion medications in the future.
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