By Athena Papakosta

Another step backwards for the country that leads the western world but chooses to turn back time. Abortions are the target.

Again.

Texas, 2023. About 200,000 people live in the city of Amarillo. It is the 14th most populous city in the second largest US state. In this the only regional judge Matthew Kasmarikten months after the Supreme Court’s decision allowing all states to ban abortions on their territory, issued a decision to suspend the marketing authorization of the pill mifepristone that has been used for at least 20 years for abortion.

Mr. Kasmarik, a former lawyer for a Christian organization, a former member of an anti-abortion group and with a sister who became a mother at 17, is known for his extreme ultra-conservative views and is the choice of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.

At the same time, his colleague, Thomas Riceappointed by Barack Obamain her State Washington ruled otherwise: that the marketing authorization of the mifepristone pill could not be withdrawn in 17 Democratic-led states trying to defend its availability. These are: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

The Justice Department asked an appeals court to freeze the Texas judge’s decision. The American Drug Administration (FDA) has filed an appeal while, for its part, the American president Joe Biden he said he was determined to fight against the decision, which he called an “unprecedented attempt to deprive women of fundamental freedoms”.

The issue will soon reach the Supreme Court whose composition has been revised towards the conservative side by former US President Donald Trump before the end of his term.

More than half of abortions in the United States rely on a two-pill drug regimen: mifepristone, which effectively terminates a pregnancy by “blocking” the hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which acts on the uterus by causing contractions and bleeding to “empty” ». Since 2000, the mifepristone pill has been used by more than five million women to safely terminate their pregnancy, and today most women who wish to have an abortion rely on it.

The Texas lawsuit was filed in late November 2022 by the conservative Christian legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, which sued the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on behalf of abortion opponents. The same group was also involved in the Mississippi case that overturned the historic Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, abolishing women’s constitutional right to abortion.

The lawsuit claims that the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone was flawed because it did not adequately consider the risks. However, the entire scientific community judges that the risks associated with the pill are negligible. In more detail, according to doctors, the complications from the use of mifepristone in the last 23 years appear at a lower rate than the complications that are observed after the removal of wisdom teeth or after a colonoscopy.

Right now, more than 300 pharmaceutical and biotech executives, including Pfizer CEO Albert Burla, have signed an open letter calling for the Texas judge’s decision to be overturned. But Wyoming has already passed a bill to ban the use or prescription, distribution and sale of mifepristone pills, while governors in Massachusetts and Washington are securing emergency supplies of the drug.

At the same time, doctors and clinics that currently prescribe the combination of the two pills have said that if mifepristone is banned, they will use misoprostol despite its lower rate of effectiveness in terminating a pregnancy, thus following the example of other countries where mifepristone is illegal. In this sense, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom announced that he will secure up to two million pills of misoprostol.

Is this also a dangerous time for women in the United States of America? Is. As stated in an opinion piece by the British The Guardian signed by Moira Donegan, “Women in the United States will find themselves degraded and humiliated by the Law, treated by the state as something less worthy than citizens and less capable than adults.” ».

When the case reaches the conservative Supreme Court, which overturns the landmark Roe v. Wade law of 1973 that guaranteed the right to abortion, hope will be extinguished, and women in the country will no longer be less free than their men, in their bodies and in their lives .