A federal appeals court appears skeptical of Biden administration arguments given on May 17 that a lower court ruling overturning a decades-old U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of abortion pill mifepristone was wrongly decided.
The case is one of many that have followed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and found there was no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution. The ruling returned the regulation of abortion to the states.
This specific case goes back to April 7 when Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Texas-based appointee of former President Donald Trump, found in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA that the agency was wrong to approve mifepristone, also known as mifeprex or RU-486, for public use in 2000 and that the FDA had stonewalled opponents of the drug for years. The judge also found that the agency had improperly lifted restrictions related to accessing the drug….