The abortion pill banned? It could happen.
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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Any day now, a far-right federal judge in Texas cherry-picked by anti-abortion groups is expected to advance a lawsuit seeking a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.
This case could be the biggest rollback of abortion access since Roe v. Wade itself was overturned.
The Intercept is investigating the anti-abortion groups behind this case, and what we’ve found is startling: a shadow medical community that is fueling the right’s legal attacks with dubious pseudoscience, sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the safety of medication abortion.
This junk science and the... network of groups behind it could get the pill banned across the country. That would be a devastating blow to abortion access and eliminate one of the only remaining avenues for those in need of care in states where abortion has been banned already.
With this critical lifeline at stake, we need to keep investigating the right-wing extremists, phony front groups, and well-funded backers behind the attack on reproductive rights — before it’s too late.
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The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the anti-abortion umbrella group spearheading the challenge to medication abortion, incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, just months before filing suit in an act of forum shopping orchestrated to land the case before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed darling of the far right.
The lawsuit claims that mifepristone is wildly dangerous and that the Food and Drug Administration erred in approving the drug 23 years ago.
The evidence presented by the plaintiffs is as phony as the organization itself.
In fact, mifepristone’s safety profile is on par with common painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, which more than 30 million Americans take in any given day.
But none of this may matter in the courtroom of a highly ideological judge appointed by Donald Trump. And if Kacsmaryk bans the abortion pill as expected, whether to uphold the ban will ultimately be up to the same far-right justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
The Intercept is exhaustively investigating the right-wing effort to eliminate access to abortion nationwide, and we rely on reader donations as a key source of funding for this work.
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