Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, along with 22 other Attorneys General, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Over the past two decades, the FDA has engaged in political calculations, not scientific ones, when it comes to chemical abortion. The Biden Administration’s shameless efforts to skirt federal and state laws with a national mail-order abortion regime flout the Court’s ruling and the rights of the people, and put women’s health in jeopardy,” said Attorney General Lynn Fitch. “It is our hope that the Fifth Circuit protects both the health of women and democracy and takes decisive action to uphold the people’s right to regulate abortion.”
In the brief, the Attorneys General argue that the Biden Administration and the FDA’s attempt to roll back safety mechanisms for the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone and to make it widely available through the mail violates both federal law and state laws. Current federal criminal law plainly prohibits the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs through the mail. (18 U.S.C. § § 1461, 1462)
As the Attorneys General write, “The FDA was not following a congressional mandate or responding to changed circumstances on mifepristone’s safety in promoting a new mail-order abortion regime. Rather, the agency was acting at the behest of the current Administration and its allies who demanded action after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.”
The Attorneys General continue, “The Administration claims that it has the power to make abortion drugs broadly accessible despite contrary determinations by States and despite laws that States have enacted to protect life, health, and safety in the use of those drugs. That claim is wrong.”
Previously in this case, Justice Samuel Alito noted in his dissent on the Application for Stay before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 21, 2023, “Our granting of a stay of a lower-court decision is an equitable remedy. It should not be given if the moving party has not acted equitably, and that is the situation here. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has engaged in what has become the practice of ‘leverag[ing]’ district court injunctions ‘as a basis’ for implementing a desired policy while evading both necessary agency procedures and judicial review.”
Attorneys General from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming joined General Fitch on this brief on the merits before the Fifth Circuit.
