Biden's administration is seeking to defend mifepristone in the face of mounting abortion bans and restrictions enacted by Republican-led states since the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized the procedure nationwide.
Argentina is the latest country in Latin America to green-light the drug, part of a two-pill abortion regimen, which now faces the threat of a ban in the United States.
The bills protect providers from discipline for providing legally protected reproductive and gender-affirming health care services. Legislators recently tacked on medicated abortion to the definition of legally protected reproductive health care services, and believe the state is the first to do so.
As per some studies, the combination of these pills causes a complete abortion in more than 99% of patients and is as safe as the traditional abortion procedure administered by a doctor in a clinic. A variety of research has found that medication abortion has low rates of adverse events, and a study published in The Lancet last year found that patients are generally satisfied with it.
Abortion rights providers had been stockpiling the abortion pill mifepristone or planning to switch to a new regimen amid the battle over the legality of a drug used in more than half of US abortions.
Typically, when patients have not yet had an intrauterine pregnancy confirmed by ultrasonogram, they are followed with serial blood tests (hCG hormone) and a repeat ultrasonogram to 'rule out' ectopic pregnancy. Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, is a hormone produced early in pregnancy by the placenta. Its detection in the urine and serum is the basis for one kind of pregnancy test.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, on Friday suspended approval of mifepristone, which will essentially make sales of the pill illegal in the U.S., while a legal challenge proceeds. A conflicting Washington state ruling on Friday blocks changes to pill sales in 17 states.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kaczmaryk, a Trump appointee, ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone in a decision that overruled decades of scientific approval. But that decision was quickly followed by U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an Obama appointee, essentially ordering the opposite and directing U.S. authorities to not many any changes that would restrict access to the drug.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas could soon order the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reconsider its 22-year-old approval for a pill used in the most common form of abortion in the United States, or order the approval revoked outright.
Pregnant people seeking terminations face similar struggles in countries like Poland and the U.S. that are cracking down on access to abortion pills - mifepristone and misoprostol. But women around the world are finding ways to access the pills despite barriers, from turning to telemedicine and online pharmacies through to black markets.
The FDA rule will make medication abortion, which accounts for more than half of US abortions, more accessible in states where abortion remains legal, but its impact on pharmacies in the states that have banned abortion remains to be seen.
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