The ACLJ Exposes Abortion Pill Myths in Federal Court Filing

Last week, the ACLJ filed an amicus brief in the abortion pill case of Louisiana v. FDA. We spent the entire brief targeting and refuting some common myths that abortion radicals champion. First, some background.

Historically, after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), abortions were done surgically. That is, the abortionist would use instruments or a suction machine violently to extract the growing child from the womb. But more recently, the development of chemical abortion methods has led to the “abortion pill” becoming the most common technique for abortion, as the pro-abortion, Planned Parenthood spin-off Guttmacher Institute recognizes.

In theory, harmful drugs like abortion pills are supposed to be illegal. But under the Clinton Administration, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortion drug mifepristone (then commonly called RU-486). In the years since, successive pro-abortion Administrations have bit by bit loosened any safeguards around the distribution of mifepristone.

Take action with the ACLJ and add your name to the petition: Defeat the Abortion Pill.

One of those changes, made under the Biden Administration, was the elimination of any requirement that the drug provider or prescriber actually see a pregnant woman face-to-face, as explained in a Biden Administration memo dated January 22, 2023, “During the COVID–19 public health emergency, the FDA stopped enforcing a prior requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person, and the FDA’s January 2023 REMS [prescribing rules] permanently removed the in-person dispensing requirement.”

This meant several things: (1) a physician need not first examine a woman to see if she had an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition which mifepristone would not remedy; (2) a physician could not make sure a woman was choosing abortion freely, as opposed to being pressured by some third party; and (3) it would not even have to be a pregnant woman at all who ordered the drugs – it could be someone else ordering the drugs because that other person wanted the woman to abort.

The state of Louisiana, under its Attorney General Liz Murrill, recently sued the FDA to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement. Joining AG Murrill as a plaintiff is Rosalie Markezich, who alleges her boyfriend coerced her into taking the drug and thereby aborting their baby. The case is pending in federal district court in the Lafayette Division of the Western District of Louisiana.

Here at the ACLJ, we’ve filed multiple briefs explaining why the approval and easy availability of mifepristone is both illegal and wrong-headed. In Louisiana & Markezich v. FDA, we have done so again.

The focus of our amicus brief was to explode some common pro-abortion myths.

The first myth is that mifepristone is medicine. But as we point out, miscarriage – loss of the baby – is a harm, a universally recognized adverse event. The very purpose of mifepristone is to kill the prenatal baby, and so by its nature, this drug is, essentially, a poison, not a medicine.

The second myth is that abortion is somehow good for women’s health because abortion is safer than childbirth. We have refuted this canard many times before, including in the Dobbs case at the Supreme Court, and we did so again in Louisiana & Markezich v. FDA.

The third myth is that abortions are only sought by women who actually want them. But as we point out, with copious documentation, this assumption is doubly wrong. For one thing, it may not be a woman at all who orders mifepristone. It may be someone else who wishes to use the drug to make her abort. And for another thing, a pregnant woman may not want to abort her baby. It may be someone else who is pressuring her to abort. There are far too many instances of women being pressured, tricked, or forced into abortions by their male partners. Likewise, women being sexually trafficked face pressure to abort. Dispensing abortion pills without any opportunity to screen for coercion makes life that much easier for those exploiting women by making them take abortion pills they don’t want.

The case of Louisiana & Markezich v. FDA is set for a hearing on February 24. We are most grateful to Louisiana attorney Kevin Vogeltanz for serving as our local counsel in the case, and to my colleague Olivia Summers for her crucial work in assembling the brief and the necessary papers.

Take action with the ACLJ and add your name to the petition: Defeat the Abortion Pill.