by Kelan Lyons, NC Newsline
January 30, 2024
Gov. Roy Cooper joined the Reproductive Freedom Alliance in filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday that encourages the justices to preserve access to mifepristone, an FDA-approved medication for abortion.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case on March 26. Their ruling could severely restrict access to the drug used for both abortions and miscarriage care.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 2000. Currently, mifepristone accounts for more than half of abortions in the country when used with another drug called misoprostol; doctors often use the same pair of drugs following a patient’s miscarriage.
Research shows medication abortion is highly effective and does not often result in complications, reasoning that has made it immensely popular among patients. State data shows that medication abortions accounted for about 23% of abortions in North Carolina in 2011; by 2020, that number was 59%.
The anti-abortion Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit at the center of the case, seeking to overturn the FDA’s approval, or at the very least, to revert to prescribing and dosing practices administered before 2016, when the FDA started implementing changes.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last year allowing mifepristone to stay on the market, but reverted those dosage and prescribing practices to pre-2016 practices. If the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, there would be significant restrictions on dispensing the drug:
Health care providers could no longer prescribe it via telehealth and mail it to patients’ homesPatients could only take the drug up to seven weeks’ gestation, not 10Only doctors could prescribe it, not a range of health care professionals with the ability to prescribe medicationsPatients would need to visit the doctors in person three times before getting the prescriptionThe dosage and timing of mifepristone and misoprostol would be limited to guidelines that went out of use in 2016.
“More than five million people have used this safe, effective medication since the FDA approved it and this case is an extremist, political attempt to take away women’s freedom to make their own private medical decisions,” Governor Roy Cooper said in a press release. “I urge the Supreme Court to protect women’s health and overturn the Fifth Circuit’s terrible decision.”
In backing the amicus curiae brief, Cooper is a part of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, a nonpartisan coalition of 22 governors advocating for protecting and expanding reproductive freedom in their states. Other governors include California’s Gavin Newsome, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, Illinois’ JB Pritzker, Maine’s Janet Mills, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, among others.
Governors formed the alliance in February 2023. Their brief argues that rolling back access to mifepristone would disrupt health care systems, put strain on health care providers and cause harm to millions of women.
“Given its mandate, the Reproductive Freedom Alliance has a significant interest in ensuring that litigants in one judicial district who are morally opposed to a particular type of prescription-drug product are not permitted to dismantle patient access to that product nationwide,” the brief reads.
The alliance argues that challenges to reproductive health access makes harder for governors to protect public health — and that the FDA is critical in that defense. By challenging the FDA’s review process, the brief argues, anti-abortion groups risk upending federal regulations and undermining governors’ ability to keep the public safe.
“This strategy, if successful, would have an enormously disruptive impact on state governance and hamstring Governors’ ability to fulfill their mandate of protecting public health and safety in the reproductive healthcare context and beyond,” the brief reads.
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