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A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday evening that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration improperly approved an abortion drug used in nearly all of the medication abortions in the U.S., putting access to the drug mifepristone in jeopardy.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk gave the government a week to seek relief from an appeals court.
The judge’s decision won’t just affect people living in states where abortion has become illegal or heavily restricted: because the case is in federal court, the judge has the ability to issue a nationwide ruling affecting people in hass
At the same time Friday, a federal judge’s ruling in a separate case filed in Washington state has blocked the FDA from removing mifepristone from the market.
It is not clear how each judge’s decision will impact the other, and both cases are likely to be appealed.
Mifepristone, was approved by the FDA in 2000 for use in combination with a second drug, misoprostol. More than half of all abortions in the United States are done using medication, as opposed to a surgical procedure, and the two-drug combination was used for 98% of them in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
A coalition of abortion rights opponents filed the lawsuit last year, saying the protocol was improperly approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The group had asked Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Trump and has longstanding ties to conservative religious groups, to overturn the approval.
The decision comes three weeks after Kacsmaryk held a hearing in Amarillo in a courtroom that had room for only a few dozen members of the public and the press. No recording or public livestreaming was permitted.
