Biden White House will fight, not ignore, abortion pill ruling suspending mifepristone

WASHINGTON – The White House on Monday rejected calls from some Democrats – including Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – to ignore last week's Texas ruling suspending the Food and Drug Administration's approval of a common abortion pill.

“We are going to always follow the law, always,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to fight.”

The administration has appealed Friday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that would effectively revoke the FDA approval granted to mifepristone in 2000.

Calling the decision "extraordinary and unprecedented," Justice Department lawyers also asked that the ruling continue to be on hold while the appeal plays out.

The government's lawyers said FDA determined mifepristone is safe and effective to terminate early pregnancies in a decision that five presidential administrations upheld.

Serious adverse effects are “exceedingly rare,” as they are for common drugs such as ibuprofen, the department said in its filings Monday to the Louisiana-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which frequently sides against the Biden administration.

The case is expected to end up at the Supreme Court in part because a judge in Washington state issued a conflicting ruling Friday protecting access to mifepristone, which is widely used in the United States.

The decision was issued 20 minutes after the Texas ruling, leading to confusion about how they interacted.

The Justice Department on Monday asked U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice to clarify how the FDA should respond if the Texas’ judge’s ruling takes effect.

That judge’s response will help the Biden administration figure out its legal strategy, according to abortion rights groups.

“We assume that that court will weigh in very soon,” said Jenny Ma, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Jean-Pierre said the administration is prepared for a long legal fight, “which we feel pretty confident that we’re going to win.”

Some Democrats have argued the administration should ignore the Texas ruling.

“The executive branch has an enforcement discretion,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, also calling the ruling “a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law.”

On the same program Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said every option was on the table.

But Jean-Pierre on Monday said it would set a dangerous precedent “to disregard a binding decision.”

Abortion rights groups praised the administration's fast response to the ruling and, as the White House did, rejected the argument that the FDA should not abide by the decision.

“The answer here really needs to be through the court system,” said Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a call with reporters Monday. “Just taking some sort of non-enforcement action, or ignoring the decision as some have called for, won't answer all of the problems – legal and otherwise – that this creates, including the dangerous precedent that this sets for all other drugs.”

That concern was echoed in a statement issued by hundreds of pharmaceutical company executives condemning what they said was “judicial activism” that has created uncertainty for the entire industry.

If courts can overturn a drug that is “safer than Tylenol, nearly all antibiotics and insulin,” the executives wrote, then “any medicine is at risk.”

Danco, the maker of Mifeprex, the brand version of mifepristone, called the District Court's decision "an extreme outlier."

"No court has ever ‘stayed’ or ‘suspended’ the longstanding approval of a drug consistently found safe and effective by FDA,” Danco’s lawyers argued in its appeal filed Monday. “The court’s mandatory injunction is an unprecedented judicial assault on a careful regulatory process that has served the public for decades. It should be immediately stayed.”

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Mifepristone: Who is Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and why was the abortion pill case in his court?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden readies fight against Texas abortion pill ruling on mifepristone