Activists adjust to Texas ruling
Limitations placed on FDA by state jurisprudence an unprecedented move
A judge’s ruling in Texas is unprecedented to many within the reproductive rights movement. Never before has a judge told the Food and Drug Administration what drugs may be permitted to be sold to the American public.
Nearly half of all abortions done in this country are through medication abortions, according to Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships with Power to Decide, an organization dedicated to advancing sexual and reproductive well-being for all. For many decades, antiabortion activists and politicians said they want to return power to the states to determine what regulations should apply to abortions.
“We're less than a year out from Dobbs,” Fey said. “And already that's not really what's happening right now. They (antiabortion activists and politicians) want to dictate what can and cannot be offered to people in states and have chosen through their elected officials to protect abortion access.”
Six in ten Americans opposed the Dobbs decision, according to polling done by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Religious sentiment toward abortion generally favors abortion access by the same measure. Majorities of all religious groups except white evangelical Protestants. Seventy-eight percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans opposed the decision, along with 73 percent of Black Protestants, 73 percent of non-Christian religious Americans, 67 percent of white mainline Protestants, 56 percent of white Catholics and 52 percent of Hispanic Catholics.
The decision in question targeted mifepristone, which is the first pill in a two-pill regimen. The second pill, misoprostol, is still available and is 95 percent effective at causing an abortion. That medication is also used for other conditions, and so it is harder to ban it outright.
It will overburden the abortion healthcare system if women have to go to clinics to get abortions. There are few places to go and the clinics that currently exist already have long wait times. If you add all the women using medication to terminate pregnancies, then those wait lines may become so long that it will force women to have abortions later or not have them at all.
“If they suddenly cannot provide both in-office procedures and medication abortion, that's only going to further hinder their capacity,” Fey said. “And that just means more people are going to be forced to carry pregnancies.”