This week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for allowing dangerous abortion pills to be mailed nationwide which undermines federal law, the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, and state pro-life abortion laws. Louisiana, and a state resident who survived abortion pill poisoning, are petitioning for the FDA to reinstate a rule that only allows the abortion pill Mifepristone to be dispensed in person. From 2016 to 2021, the FDA under the Obama and Biden administrations deregulated Mifepristone removing nearly all safeguards, including the in-person dispensary requirement under Biden, despite the drug’s questionable safety record.
Louisiana is one the most protective states of unborn life in the nation with a ban on nearly all abortions and even classifies the abortion pill regimen as dangerous “controlled substances.”
According to the lawsuit, the state’s abortion laws did not prevent Louisiana resident Rosalie Markezich from becoming “a victim of FDA’s mail-order abortion scheme.” In October 2023, her boyfriend coerced her into taking Mifepristone he had received from an out-of-state doctor.
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“Although she intended to throw them up as soon as she could get away from him, she was unsuccessful, and she lost her baby,” the lawsuit states. Markezich suffered intense pain and heavy bleeding during the abortion, and still suffers from “prolonged emotional trauma” and continues to mourn the loss of her child because of the abortion pill’s deregulation. The lawsuit also notes that state doctors, hospitals, and pregnancy centers routinely encounter women experiencing adverse side effects from Mifepristone.
“But for [the FDA]…Rosalie would have received the protection of a private in-person medical appointment. And if she had been able to tell a doctor that she did not want an abortion, the drugs that took her baby’s life would never have been provided,” the lawsuit reads. “Louisiana has incontrovertible evidence that…doctors and others are … sending streams of mifepristone into Louisiana for the express purpose of causing thousands of abortions in Louisiana each year.”
Even with its abortion laws, the lawsuit cites there are still roughly 8,000 or more babies killed every year in Louisiana from abortion drugs. According to the FDA’s own label, one in 25 abortive mothers who use Mifepristone may end up in the emergency room.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrell explains in the lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision empowered states to protect women and babies from abortion. However, she alleges Biden explicitly changed the abortion by mail regulations to directly circumvent pro-life state laws, which also ignores and violates the Comstock Act that outlaws mailing abortion-related materials.
“Shortly after Dobbs, pro-abortion activists and doctors launched a nationwide effort to effectuate abortions in pro-life states like Louisiana—all without setting foot in those states,” wrote AG Murrell. “How? By mail. Every year, doctors and activists in states like California and New York mail a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved abortion drug called Mifepristone to thousands of Louisiana residents for the express purpose of causing abortions in Louisiana that are blatantly unlawful.”
AG Murrell continued, “This extra-territorial mailing of abortion drugs is illegal under state law—and it is the direct result of the Biden Administration’s 2023 agency action expressly facilitating this scheme.”
In April 2023, a federal court in Texas had already ruled that the FDA violated rulemaking with these regulatory changes in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA. However, during an appeal, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits but dismissed the case ruling that the pro-life doctors who challenged the FDA did not have standing.
Last week, 51 U.S. Senators sent a letter to the heads of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA stating the “abortion-on-demand culture” has been “deadly for preborn babies” and in some cases “lethal to their mother.” The Senators requested that the FDA “suspend” the distribution of Mifepristone and all its generic versions as an “imminent hazard,” and restore the in-person dispensing requirement to “protect women” and the “voiceless” from the “dangerous effects of unregulated access to chemical abortion drugs.”
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The FDA’s deregulatory actions regarding abortion drugs are destroying innocent children and harming women. The FDA can no longer be allowed to violate federal law and circumvent state abortion laws by facilitating abortion pill trafficking nationwide through the mail. Chemical abortions are never safe and harm women and kill children.”
