A bloc of national medical associations and doctors focusing on caring for pregnant and post-abortive women is suing federal officials, claiming they illegally approved chemical abortion drugs that they say harm girls and women.
Most abortions carried out in the United States nowadays are induced by chemicals, not accomplished by surgical means, according to lawyers who filed the new lawsuit.
The lawsuit, launched Nov. 18, is one of several that have popped up taking aim at abortion-related policies since the Supreme Court found in June that there is no constitutional right to abortion, overturning the 49-year-old precedent Roe v. Wade in the process.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) placed “politics over science when it pushed for the legalization of the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in 2000,” according to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a public interest law firm specializing in religious freedom cases.
“The only way the FDA was able to approve the drugs was by characterizing pregnancy as an ‘illness’ and arguing that these drugs provide a ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit,’” ADF said in a statement.
By greenlighting the chemical abortion drugs, the FDA ignored its legal obligation to safeguard the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women, ADF said. The agency never studied the safety of the drugs, ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls, disregarded evidence that these drugs cause more complications than surgical abortions, and eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant girls and women who undergo “this dangerous drug regimen.”
ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake said “the FDA has a responsibility to protect the health and safety of women and girls, but the FDA has refused to do so.”
“And it has refused to protect women and girls from the harms of dangerous chemical abortion drugs. So our lawsuit seeks to have the court order FDA to follow the science, put politics aside, and withdraw chemical abortion drugs from the market nationwide,” Blake told The Epoch Times in an interview.
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