Buckle up
“You could see this one coming a mile off,” snarked Charlie Pierce (Washington Post):
A federal appeals court said Wednesday that it would restrict access to a widely used abortion medication after finding that the federal government did not follow the proper process when it loosened regulations in 2016 to make the pill more easily available.
Food and Drug Administration decisions to allow the drug mifepristone to be taken later in pregnancy, be mailed directly to patients and be prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor were not lawful, a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled.
Mifepristone will remain available while the Department of Justice appeals the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“You damn bet it will,” Pierce continued. “Right into the lap of Justice Sam Alito, who will undoubtedly find some obscure codicil in the Code of Hammurabi to justify upholding the ruling of the 5th Circuit, which is the Uruk-Hai to Alito’s Saruman anyway. All the lawyers seeking to ban the drug will need to do is talk very fast and use the word ‘abortifacient’ a lot. And the ducks will all be marching in formation.”
“Sooner or later, some loaded court will declare all contraceptives to be ‘abortifacients,'” Pierce adds, “and that will be the final end for a protected right of privacy.”
The three judges on the 5th Circuit “were appointed by Republican presidents. During oral arguments in May, the trio indicated a willingness to restrict access to the drug,” reports The Hill. “Medication abortion currently accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House stands behind the FDA’s decision. Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement to that effect. That’s nice, but not very comforting for women watching their options for self-determination slip away.
We’ve seen that radicalized MAGA Republican pols, to date anyway, are not particularly attuned to public opinion on such matters. They’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. It remains to be seen if the Roberts Court has ears to hear what voters in Kansas, Ohio and several other states said with their votes so loudly so recently.
The Hill again:
Some conservative groups are pleading with candidates to abandon extreme positions, reports The Hill’s Nathaniel Weixel. The goal of a national abortion ban remains remote, they argue, and the aim is to win elections nationwide next year and then to continue working on restricting abortions in the states. The upshot is a “circular firing squad” among right-leaning groups and candidates, according to Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.
[…]
Republican leaders in the nation’s capital have attempted to move beyond the abortion issue, but state conservatives want to keep abortion in the national spotlight. Senate Republicans believe conservative anti-abortion moves by state legislatures and governors could backfire and wind up boosting Democratic candidates in Arizona, Montana, Nevada and Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio.
The GOP is playing with fire. Backlash to Trump in 2018 and 2020 rained on the GOP’s parades. Backlash to the Dobbs decision in 2022 turned their midterm red tsunami into a ripple. It’s not that they are slow learners as much as conservative muscle memory for doubling/tripling/quadrupling down has more influence over the GOP. Democracies depend on the consent of the governed. MAGA Republicans are building a Margaret Atwood-inspired autocracy.
Chastity belts are considered inventions of myth, and museum specimens believed created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless.”
That perfectly describes the immediate past occupant of the White House as well as his reputation as a business genius and champion of Christians. Seventy-four million Americans voted for him in 2020.
The throwback right won’t stop at Dobbs, or at statewide abortion bans, or at banning mifepristone. They’ll move on to chasity belts. Invest in a startup now.