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Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to FDA’s Approval of Mifepristone

NPR, June 13, 2024

The U.S. The Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills. By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game. The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury. The court’s action amounted to a legal off-ramp, leaving the FDA rules in place, without directly addressing the regulations themselves. The court’s decision also avoided, at least for now, a challenge to the entire structure of the FDA’s regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety—a system that for decades has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation. Since the court reversed Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion in 2022, pills have become the most popular abortion method in the U.S. More than half the women who choose to terminate a pregnancy use a combination of pills approved by the FDA, including mifepristone, manufactured by Danco Laboratories and marketed as Mifeprex. The pill regimen was first approved 24 years ago, and over the past seven years, the agency has approved changes in the dosing regimen and eliminated some restrictions that it found to be unnecessary. For instance, the pills can now be prescribed during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, instead of the original seven weeks, and prescriptions can be filled by mail or at pharmacies, instead of at a doctor’s office. The result, according to Danco Labs, is that there have been fewer complications than when the drug was initially approved for just seven weeks in 2000.

Southern Baptists Vote to Oppose Use of I.V.F.

The New York Times, June 12, 2024

Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted on Wednesday to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization. The vote was an indication that evangelicals are increasingly open to arguments that equate embryos with human life, and that two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “fetal personhood” may be the next front for the anti-abortion movement. More than 10,000 delegates, called “messengers,” have gathered in Indianapolis for the denomination’s annual meeting, which is closely watched as a barometer of evangelical sentiment on a variety of cultural and political issues. The vote on Wednesday was the first time that attendees at the Southern Baptist meeting have addressed the ethics of in vitro fertilization directly. The resolution proposed on Wednesday called on Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the I.V.F. process.” It also exhorted them to “advocate for the government to restrain” actions inconsistent with the dignity of “every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.” A vast majority of the delegates oppose abortion, but fertility treatments are widely used by evangelicals. Although the process of in vitro fertilization often results in the destruction of unused embryos, many Southern Baptists see that as fundamentally different from abortion because the goal of fertility treatments is to create new life. Before the vote, messengers heard several emotional testimonies, some from Baptists who hoped to soften the language of the resolution, titled “On the Ethical Realities of Reproductive Technologies and the Dignity of the Human Embryo.”

171,000 Traveled for Abortions Last Year. See Where They Went.

The New York Times, June 13, 2024

More than 14,000 Texas patients crossed the border into New Mexico for an abortion last year. An additional 16,000 left Southern states bound for Illinois. And nearly 12,000 more traveled north from South Carolina and Georgia to North Carolina. These were among the more than 171,000 patients who traveled for an abortion in 2023, new estimates show, demonstrating both the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the limits of state bans to stop the procedure. The data also highlights the unsettled nature of an issue that will test politicians up and down the ballot in November. Out-of-state travel for abortions – either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills – more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions. Most traveling patients went to the next closest state that allowed abortions. But those in the South, where 13 states banned or restricted the procedure, had to go farther. One traveler was a 24-year-old woman from Columbus, Ga., who asked to be identified by only her first initial, A. She flew to New York City last summer after discovering she was past six weeks of pregnancy, when Georgia no longer allows abortion. She decided to travel over a weekend instead of self-managing with pills at home. “I had to go back to work on Monday,” she said. “I just didn’t have that kind of time.” Texas, the largest state to ban abortion, had the most residents travel across state lines for the procedure, the data shows. On the receiving end, nowhere saw more out-of-state patients – and from more states – than Illinois.

The ‘Pregnancy Police’ Were Around Long Before Roe v. Wade Fell

HuffPost, June 12, 2024

For decades, pregnant people have been arrested, charged with various crimes and jailed for their pregnancy outcomes. A 27-year-old white woman from Tennessee attempted suicide while pregnant in 1986. She survived, but the fetus was stillborn. She was arrested, charged with criminal abortion and held on a $5,000 bond. She pleaded not guilty for reasons of insanity. In 1999, Regina McKnight, a 22-year-old Black woman from South Carolina, gave birth to a five-pound stillborn baby. McKnight was drug tested after the birth and arrested in the hospital for “homicide by child abuse” because she tested positive for cocaine. Although it was not conclusive that the cause of the stillbirth was due to her drug use, McKnight was sentenced to 20 years in prison after the jury deliberated for only 15 minutes. Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old woman from Mexico, managed her own abortion using pills in 2004 in South Carolina because she couldn’t afford a fourth child or the $700 in-clinic abortion on the $1.50 an hour she earned picking lettuce. Her neighbor found out about her abortion and called the cops, who initially wanted to charge Flores with homicide and seek the death penalty. Flores eventually pleaded guilty to an illegal abortion and spent a total of seven months in jail. These are just a few of the stories included in Grace E. Howard’s new book, “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood,” in which she analyzes 1,116 pregnancy-related arrests that happened between 1973 and 2022 in Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. Although the cases vary from self-managed abortion to substance use and miscarriage, each person was arrested for crimes against their own pregnancy. “The criminal prosecution of pregnant people for crimes against the fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses they carry relies on a legal understanding that pregnant people occupy a different, lower space in the United States’ system of law,” Howard, who uses she/they pronouns, writes in her book.

Abortion Groups Say Tech Companies Suppress Posts and Accounts

The New York Times, June 11, 2024

TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe. The groups and women’s health advocates say these examples, all from recent months, show why they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services.They say the companies’ policies on abortion-related content, including advertisements, have long been opaque. But they say the platforms seem to have been more aggressive about removing or suppressing posts that share information about how to obtain safe and legal procedures since the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And when the platforms do restrict the accounts, the companies can be difficult to contact to learn why. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an organization dedicated to abolishing abortion, said big technology companies had routinely limited its and other groups’ pro-life speech, suspending accounts and blocking ads with little explanation. “Transparency is the main point,” said Jane Eklund, a fellow at the human rights group Amnesty International USA, which released a report on Tuesday calling on tech giants to clearly outline and explain their rules around abortion-related content. “Without clear guidelines, it’s difficult to hold them accountable for their actions that could be impacting users or to identify and address any content moderation that affects what people can find online.” Concerns that some of the tech platforms are suppressing posts about abortion have led to changes in how women and organizations talk about it online. They intentionally misspell the term as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n,” or replace the “bor” with a boar emoji in hopes of reaching more people.

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