A federal appeals court packed with conservatives has handed abortion opponents a major victory against the US Food and Drug Administration, effectively reinstating an in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion medication mifepristone and likely shutting down telemedicine providers from prescribing the abortion pill across the US. In a 3-0 order issued Friday afternoon, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals granted Louisiana’s request for an injunction against FDA rule changes from 2023 that have allowed blue-state telehealth providers to send mifepristone to thousands of patients every month in states where abortion is banned. At least temporarily, the ruling could severely disrupt the availability of mifepristone nationwide. The ruling, however, does not affect misoprostol, the second medication used with mifepristone to terminate pregnancies—and a powerful abortion drug on its own. Nonetheless, the ban will have the greatest impact on women in the dozen or so states—many in the South—where lawmakers and attorneys general have sought to end access completely. The 2023 telemedicine rule change “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the court. “Both injuries are irreparable.” “Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,'” Duncan wrote. He was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Donald Trump in 2017. “Telehealth has been the last bridge to care for many seeking abortion, which is precisely why Louisiana officials want it banned,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “This isn’t about science—it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible. Telehealth has transformed healthcare. Selectively stripping that away from abortion patients is a political blockade.” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed her lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to drop the in-person dispensing rule was “arbitrary” and “capricious,” and that abortion pills are too risky to prescribe remotely, even though scores of studies around the globe have proven otherwise. She also claimed the rule change was “avowedly political”—that is, it explicitly intended to get around the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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