In a series of actions that helps shed light on journalistic bias even as it clarifies the meaning of the term “contraception” and the illegitimacy of the federal government “deciding” whether certain products can be sold, a pro-life group has filed suit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its approval of chemical abortion drugs in the United States.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) November 18 filed suit in the Northern US District Court of Texas, Amarillo Division, on behalf of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, and four pro-life doctors – and their press release about the move covers a great deal of important historical ground:
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration chose politics over science when it pushed for the legalization of the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in 2000. The only way the FDA was able to approve the drugs was by characterizing pregnancy as an ‘illness’ and arguing that these drugs provide a ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit.’ As the medical groups and doctors filing suit explain, by approving chemical abortion drugs, the FDA failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women. The FDA never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use, ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls, disregarded the substantial evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause more complications than surgical abortions, and eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant girls and women who undergo this dangerous drug regimen.”
Bob Adelman offers more background in his report for The New American:
“The use of RU-486, aka mifepristone, was successfully blocked by pro-life groups for years after it was developed in France. But during the Clinton administration, then-president Bill Clinton instructed the FDA to promote the testing, licensing (for profit), and manufacture of the drug.
This led to the French pharmaceutical company that held the patent on the life-ending drug to donate it for free to the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Population Council. From there it was a short hop to approval by the FDA. By September 2000, the FDA had approved the council’s application, and abortion by ingesting poisonous chemicals became legal in the United States.”
Adelman notes:
"There was major pushback against the FDA, including two citizen petitions, both of which were ignored for years by the agency before finally being rejected. Along the way the agency continued to make the drug ever more accessible, finally even making it available by mail."
And, as the ADF points out, the FDA pushed the bizarre fiction that pregnancy is, somehow, an “illness” to facilitate its approval.
“’Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit—they end a baby’s life and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother,’ said ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake. ‘The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs.’”
The lawsuit against the FDA states:
“In asserting these transparently false conclusions, the FDA exceeded its regulatory authority to approve the drugs.
What’s more, the FDA needed to disavow science and the law because the FDA never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use despite being required to do so by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA).
The agency also ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls in violation of the Pediatric Research and Equity Act (PREA).
And the FDA disregarded the substantial evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause more complications than even surgical abortions.”
All of which are statements that appear to have upset the editors at left-wing publication, “Jezebel” – which boasts on its banner: “Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth.”
Related: Thanksgiving Reflection: ‘We’re Thankful For Our Abortions'
As one might expect, Susan Rinkunas’ November 18 piece on the suit depicts the pro-life plaintiffs as “anti-abortion,” writing:
“The anti-abortion group behind the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has now filed a federal lawsuit seeking to reverse the approval of the abortion drug, mifepristone.”
At least she didn’t call the chemical a “morning after pill” or claim it was a “contraceptive” the way so many leftists often do.
Abortion-pushers might want to keep in mind that an abortion pill is not a contraceptive. It doesn’t stop conception. It ends an already-started, distinct human life by flooding the body with chemicals and disrupting the mother’s hormonal system.
And pro-life constitutionalists applauding this suit might want to broaden their view, as well, because, as laudable as it is to see people stand up to support the reality that a fetus is a living human being with all the same God-given rights as any other, the suit assumes as acceptable many federal actions and bureaus that, very clearly, are not acceptable.
The first erroneous assumption that is not being questioned is the absurd belief that there is any constitutional legitimacy in the 1938 “FFDCA”, which created the Food and Drug Administration; that, of course, is matched by the erroneous belief PREA (passed in 2003) and the various other “food” and “drug” “regulations” and “approval processes” are, in any way, provided any cover by the US Constitution.
The fact that the FDA has been around since FDR was President is not evidence of any form of constitutionality. Like all federal goon-squads and their “regulations” over products or services (even dangerous ones) that might be exchanged across state borders, the presence of the FDA is evidence of a misreading of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (Article One, Section Eight). As James Madison noted at the time of the Founding, the clause was written to allow the Congress to handle trade-block disputes between the States as governments, not to allow the feds to manipulate, command, or block the transport or sale of items or services going over state borders.
As The Tenth Amendment Center notes, Madison wrote in 1825:
“It is very certain [the power to regulate interstate commerce] grew out of the abuse of the power of the importing states in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventative provision against injustice amongst the states themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.”
And the center also observes:
“As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out, under the Court’s’ expansive definition of the ‘commerce clause,’ the federal government has ‘no meaningful limits.’”
This lawsuit is important not only because it has a bearing on life and death, parenthood and murder, but also because the FDA should not exist and should have no say over whether certain chemicals are legal to purchase, even if they are designed to poison living beings. The actual sale of a deadly weapon is not a federal issue, nor is it a matter for state involvement, in the generic sense.
As much as people are justifiably revolted by abortion pills, there are many things people can ingest that could kill a fetus, and it is not the manufacture or sale of those things that is the criminal act.
It's the USE of those things.
This is not completely analogous to the sale of a firearm, but it is close. In the case of the gun, the weapon usually will be owned for peaceful reasons, while the abortion pill is made such that it likely will be used to kill an innocent child. But if a maker of abortion pills makes a million of them, and no one uses them, has anyone committed a crime? The "regulatory" question and the lawsuit are intertwined with the moral question, which, in addition to the constitutional issue, could be worth exploring.
This is a big issue, and the first lesson it offers us is that even as a conservative group focuses on federal laws to challenge FDA approval of the abortion drug, the group also could do well to call into question the constitutionality of the FDA, itself.
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