This suit is causing a bit of an uproar: State of Missouri; State of Kansas; State of Idaho, Intervenor Plaintiffs, v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, et al. It starts out…
Women face severe, even life-threatening, harm because the federal government has disregarded their health and safety.
Defendant U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the statutory responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of all Americans by putting commonsense safeguards on high-risk drugs.
But the FDA has failed in this responsibility by removing many of the safety standards it once provided to women using abortion drugs. Abortion drugs are dangerous—the FDA’s own label says that an estimated roughly one in 25 women who take abortion drugs will visit the emergency room.
But the FDA has enabled online abortion providers to mail FDA approved abortion drugs to women in states that regulate abortion—dispensing abortion drugs with no doctor care, no exam, and no in-person follow-up care. These dangerous drugs are now flooding states like Missouri and Idaho and sending women in these States to the emergency room. …
In rolling back safeguard after safeguard, the FDA has turned a blind eye to the known harms of abortion drugs to the detriment of women and girls.
And now they’re setup to enumerate the harms, in their minds, of abortion drugs, including this (pp 189-190):
These estimates also show the effect of the FDA’s decision to remove all in-person dispensing protections. When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly “do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,” even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that “women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.” The study thus concludes that “one explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions. This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.
A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds,” such as potentially “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are” reduced or their increase diminished. Dep’t of Com. v. New York, 588 U.S. 752, 766–67, (2019).
Or, in other words, they thought that most abortions were really optional and not worth pursuing, and they’re shocked that, no, abortions are necessary, medically or otherwise, in the eyes of the pregnant women. They demand that more women carry potentially dangerous pregnancies to term … so that they can have another Representative in Congress? Or lose funding?
The implicit reasoning that different States will have different outcomes if mifepristone is banned at the federal level is, well, questionable.
Wonkette is outraged:
So not only are they claiming that they are harmed by not being able to force adult women to have babies they don’t want, they are also harmed by not being able to force teenage girls to have babies they don’t want.
I’d like to point out at this juncture that teen moms are significantly less likely than their peers to graduate from high school, and that teenage pregnancy is very closely related to poverty — two-thirds of teen moms who move out of their parents’ house live below the federal poverty level. Seventy-eight percent of children born to unwed teen moms live below the poverty level.
Now, sure — there are some success stories, girls who have kids and go on to college and do well for themselves. But it’s not a lot! These states are more or less saying that they are willing to condemn a significant portion of these girls and their children to poverty so that they don’t lose a vote in the Electoral College. That is truly sick.
