USA, the Supreme Court guarantees access to the abortion pill

Almost two years after the abolition of the ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion, the US Supreme Court voted to preserve access to the pill abortifacient, mifepristone, which is now the most common method of terminating pregnancy in the United States.

The case was taken to the Supreme Court afterwards a complaint filed in 2022 by a group of anti-abortion doctorsL’Alliance for Hippocratic Medicinewho argued that the Food and Drug Administrationthe agency responsible for regulating drugs, had approved the online sale of mifepristone without sufficient guarantees for health of patients. A Texas judge ruled in favor of this group.

Mifepristone (also known as RU-486) ​​was approved by the FDA in 2000 for women who were less than seven weeks pregnant. Since 2016 it can be used up to 10 weeks of gestation. In December 2021, the FDA eliminated the prescription requirementeffectively authorizing the online sale and shipment of the drug by post.

After the Supreme Court’s decision of 24 June 2022, which established that the issue of legalizing abortion should be left to the States, the conservatives also wanted to limit access to mifepristone via the internet. But the nine justices of the Supreme Court unanimously decided that theAlliance for Hippocratic Medicine he had no legal right to sue.

“Plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, and ideological objections to abortion and to the FDA’s loose regulation,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “but they failed to demonstrate” any real harm. “A plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available is no basis for filing a lawsuit.”

The ruling has no bearing on laws prohibiting the termination of pregnancies: medical abortion remains illegal in states that ban it. But the abortion pill was an effective solution to the bans, and thousands of blisters arrived by post even in states where the rules are more restrictive.

According to Guttmacher Institutenearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States today are medical. More than one million pregnancies were terminated last year, the highest number in more than a decade. After about twenty years of use, the FDA, theAmerican College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and other medical organizations have argued that both mifepristone and misoprostol are safe for women. US studies say medical abortion is about 95% effective in ending a pregnancy and requires further medical follow-up less than 1% of the time.

Source: Vanity Fair

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