Conservative Ideology Over Evidence: The Abortion Pills

Several links today to articles on the same topic.

Washington Post, 13 Apr 2023: Unpacking the flawed science cited in the Texas abortion pill ruling

A Texas judge’s decision to invalidate federal approval of a key abortion drug cites research based on anonymous blog posts, cherry-picks statistics that exaggerate the negative physical and psychological effects of mifepristone, and ignores hundreds of scientific studies attesting to the medication’s safety.

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Media Matters, 12 Apr 2023: The junk-science ruling restricting mifepristone approval uses language directly lifted from anti-abortion activists and spread by right-wing media

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Vox, 13 Apr 2023: The Fifth Circuit’s chaotic new mifepristone decision, explained, subtitled “Republican judges claim the power to second-guess the FDA’s scientific judgments.”

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Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 12 Apr 2023: The Anti-Abortion Movement Just Made a Powerful New Enemy, subtitled “The mifepristone decision has awakened a sleeping giant.”

For decades, the pharmaceutical and biotech industry tried to avoid the politics of abortion. On Friday, that strategy came to a crashing halt. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s lawless and unprecedented decision ordering the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of mifepristone, the first drug in a medication abortion, poses an existential threat to the entire industry: If upheld, the order would allow any doctor to file a lawsuit compelling the FDA to revoke approval of any drug they dislike. If any such suit succeeds, a single, handpicked judge could overrule the FDA’s scientific determinations and issue a nationwide block on that medication. The drug need not have anything to do with reproductive health: vaccines, antibiotics, antidepressants, hormones, statins, painkillers—all are vulnerable under Kacsmaryk’s decision.

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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, 13 Apr 2023: Paper Doll Politics, subtitled “The recent rulings on access to the abortion pill assume women should have no agency over their own lives.”

If you take Matthew Kacsmaryk’s lengthy opinion last week ordering a stay of the FDA’s long-standing approval of the abortion medication mifepristone at its word, there are only two kinds of women in the country: the slutty ones and the stupid ones. To the extent this worldview maps almost perfectly onto the typology of All Disney Princesses circa 1960, you need not be hugely surprised; after all, in some quarters of the country and clearly in Judge Kacsmaryk’s fantasy gender universe, it never actually stopped being 1960. Instead, women still deserve whatever it is they get, and somehow also need to be protected from whatever it is they want.

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CNN, Michele Goodwin and Mary Ziegler, 11 Apr 2023: Opinion: Anti-abortion advocates are using junk science to usurp the will of the American people

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NY Times, 7 Apr 2023: Are Abortion Pills Safe? Here’s the Evidence.

More than 100 scientific studies, spanning continents and decades, have examined the effectiveness and safety of mifepristone and misoprostol, the abortion pills that are commonly used in the United States. All conclude that the pills are a safe method for terminating a pregnancy.

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Yet the latest example of how conservatives do ideology, based on Bronze-age morality, and disregard evidence about what is actually real.

Of course I doubt that conservatives, or this judge, is much concerned with the *safety* of the pills — they’re just looking for any way, however duplicitous, to prevent women from having abortions of any kind. Why? Well, applying themes that have run through this blog all along: 1) conservatives tend to think in simplistic black and white terms, and therefore an embryo no matter how small is equivalent to an adult human being, and therefore abortion is murder; 2) deep-seated priorities of evolutionarily-derived human nature require expansion of the tribe at all costs, and therefore abortions are not allowed and any sexual activity without the potential to produce children (homosexuality, masturbation) is punishable by death (Leviticus). Never mind Biblical verses elsewhere that imply the death of a woman’s fetus is incidental compared to the murder of an adult. Or that other religions have not reached the same conclusions about these matters as the Christians. Christians in the US don’t do “separation of church and state”; they presume their beliefs trump everyone else’s, and must be put into law to apply to everyone.