Senator Murray: “It is absolutely infuriating that we have judges overruling medical experts and patient and doctor experience to impose outdated restrictions on mifepristone that fly in the face of medical science.”
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair and senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, issued the following statement in response to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA case imposing restrictions on access to mifepristone—which will not go into effect as litigation proceeds in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year. Mifepristone is a safe and effective medication abortion drug that was approved by the FDA in 2000 and is used in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.
“It is absolutely infuriating that we have judges overruling medical experts and patient and doctor experience to impose outdated restrictions on mifepristone that fly in the face of medical science. This has nothing to do with facts or science—it’s about ideology and controlling women’s bodies, plain and simple. This case has enormous implications for other safe and effective, FDA-approved medications Americans rely on—and while patients should know that current access to mifepristone will, for now, remain the same, it’s critical this decision is quickly appealed and that we win this case.
“I cannot underscore just how outrageous—and how dangerous—it is that Republicans have fought in court to block access to a drug the FDA approved more than twenty years ago that is safer than Tylenol and absolutely essential to women’s access to reproductive health care and well-being.
“Anti-choice extremists, including those who brought this lawsuit and their Republican allies in Congress, are trying everything they can think of to rip away access to reproductive health care and ban abortion nationwide. We will keep fighting back with everything we have and at every step of the way to win in court and protect full access to mifepristone.”
Senator Murray has been leading the response to this dangerous lawsuit in Congress. The morning after Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision in the federal district court in Texas, Murray forcefully denounced the ruling in a press call the very next morning with Leader Schumer, helped lead her colleagues in filing an amicus brief before the Fifth Circuit urging a stay of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, underscored how harmful the Fifth Circuit’s ruling overriding FDA’s experts and imposing outdated restrictions on the drug, and helped lead her colleagues in filing an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to stay the lower court ruling, which the Court did in April—allowing mifepristone to remain on the market under its existing FDA approval while the merits of the case are under review.
Senator Murray has been warning about the tremendous harm this lawsuit could inflict on women and patients in all 50 states—and she has been leading the fight in Congress to protect Americans’ reproductive rights and ability to get medication abortion, as well. She pushed to expand access to mifepristone as COVID-19 first spread across the U.S. and blocked Republicans’ attempts to curb access to it in the middle of the pandemic. Senator Murray applauded FDA’s removal of burdensome barriers to mifepristone and has long underscored that access to medications like mifepristone, which has a strong track record of safety and effectiveness, should be based on science, not politics.
Senator Murray has always fought to make reproductive health care more accessible and affordable for women everywhere–beating back countless Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and other family planning services over the course of her career, and she is widely credited with successfully pushing the Bush administration to follow the science and make Plan B available over the counter.
Murray led her colleagues at the very outset of this Congress to make crystal clear that Senate Democrats are continuing to fight to protect every American’s reproductive rights and will be a firewall against House Republicans’ continued attacks on our rights—and that’s exactly what she’s doing now. Senator Murray helped lead 48 of her colleagues in reintroducing the Women’s Health Protection Act to put an end to the chaos Republicans have caused and restore Roe nationwide.
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