Late last night, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in response to the Department of Justice’s appeal of the decision in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA attempting to stay the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. The decision from the Fifth Circuit largely refused to block the order from the lower court.
Dr. Jamila Perritt, ob/gyn and abortion provider in Washington DC and President & CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health responds:
“As a community of abortion care providers, we are infuriated by the Fifth Circuit’s decision to second guess the provision of safe, essential abortion care. This decision makes it clear that these judges are not interested in listening to the medical experts on what voluminous research and decades of medical practice has shown to be true time and time again: medication abortion care is safe and a normal part of people’s sexual and reproductive health needs over the course of their lifetimes.
This decision affirms what we’ve always known to be true… This was never about the safety or efficacy of mifepristone.
“This decision affirms what we’ve always known to be true: the Fifth Circuit is more interested in controlling and coercing people’s lives and disrupting their autonomy rather than centering their actual basic human rights. This was never about the safety or efficacy of mifepristone. Mifepristone has been used as a part of full spectrum obstetrics and sexual health care in the United States for over twenty years.
“No one sitting at a bench in a courtroom should be able to interfere with how actual health care providers caring for actual patients should be able to do their jobs.”