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A single conservative judge in Texas has provoked sudden health care and legal chaos by effectively halting the nationwide use of a popular abortion drug by the end of the week.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision to suspend the Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug mifepristone, which has been used safely for more than 20 years, marked an extraordinary use of judicial power in the face of scientific data and is likely to force the Supreme Court to take up abortion again, a year after it overturned Roe v. Wade.
His ruling on Friday, which he paused for a week to allow appeals, also represented a judicial intervention into the health care decisions of millions of American women and could effectively make abortion unavailable in many states if it goes into force. The Biden administration is already mobilizing to thwart the judge’s audacious move after lodging an appeal.
But the ruling is causing sharp political reverberations amid criticism from health care regulators and providers. The situation is complicated because less than an hour later, a judge in Washington state issued a dueling ruling requiring the government to keep the drug available in 18 liberal jurisdictions that had sued to expand access to abortion pills. Politically, this latest resurgence of abortion politics will raise fears among Republicans that the party’s rigid anti-abortion line could provoke a backlash – and it’s already giving Democrats a powerful new example to mobilize voters heading into 2024.
The intensity of the storm Kacsmaryk whipped up was evident in heated rhetoric between Republicans and Democrats on Sunday. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra vowed that women would have safe and effective medication available after the administration launched a legal appeal to stop the suspension from going into force on Friday.
“For America’s sake and for women’s sake, we have to prevail in this,” Becerra told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the ruling an “extreme abuse of power” on the same show. And in a sign of a growing constitutional tangle, she suggested the FDA could effectively ignore it on the grounds that it was a “mockery of our democracy, and a mockery of our law.
