Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford speaks to the Las Vegas Sun editorial board Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022.
Published Tuesday, April 11, 2023 | 1:29 p.m.
Updated Tuesday, April 11, 2023 | 3:50 p.m.
Nevada is joining a multistate challenge to a recent federal court ruling that could restrict access to medication abortion nationwide, Attorney General Aaron Ford said.
The group — consisting of attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia — filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit to urge the court to issue a stay in the ruling made out of a U.S. District Court in Texas.
On Friday, a judge ruled to suspend the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, which has been deemed safe for ending pregnancies for more than two decades.
Just hours after Friday’s ruling in Texas, another U.S. District Court judge in Washington barred the FDA from taking any action to reduce the availability of mifepristone in 16 states, including Nevada. The federal judge in the Washington case granted a preliminary injunction that preserves access to the drug for Nevada and other states that sued in that case, Ford’s office said in a release.
“Situations like this — in which federal courts send down conflicting or contradictory rulings on issues related to abortion — are an absolutely foreseeable consequence to the short-sighted decision to strip Americans of their constitutional rights to reproductive health care,” Ford said in the release.
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which for nearly 50 years presumed the constitutional right to an abortion.
Despite Friday’s ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, mifepristone will remain available until Friday. Kacsmaryk in his ruling gave seven days for the decree to take effect. The Biden administration already has appealed the decision.
The coalition suing is asking the appellate court to stay the lower court’s “unprecedented and legally erroneous decision” given the “decades of clinical research and studies” affirming mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness, according to the release. The FDA first approved mifepristone as part of a two-step medicated abortion regimen in 2000.
Nevada U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, both Democrats, announced separately they were among the more than 240 federal lawmakers to submit another amicus brief to the Fifth Circuit challenging Friday’s ruling out of Texas. In the brief, the members of Congress stressed the Texas ruling had no basis in law and risks denying access to mifepristone, regardless of if a patient lives in a state where abortion is legal.
Further, the lawmakers said the ruling also jeopardizes patient access to a variety of other medications by threatening the FDA’s drug approval process, which was designed and mandated by Congress.
“The District Court appears to have second-guessed FDA’s scientific determination with cherry-picked anecdotes and studies, and on what basis, imposed a remedy that could significantly upend the status quo,” the lawmakers' brief read “Its perilous consequences reach far beyond mifepristone. Providers and patients rely on the availability of thousands of FDA-approved drugs to treat or manage a range of medical conditions, including asthma, HIV, infertility, heart disease, diabetes, and more.”
Medication abortion now accounts for more than half of terminated pregnancies across the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that advocates for reproductive rights.
Health experts say the most effective and safe way of undergoing a medication abortion is first taking mifepristone and then following up with a dose of the drug misoprostol. That type of two-step medical abortion can generally be used in the first 10 weeks of gestation, according to FDA guidelines.
Should the mifepristone ban ultimately be upheld, Gabriela Aguilar, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, said a medication abortion could still be achieved using misoprostol.
“[But] mifepristone not only increases the effectiveness of the medication abortion regimen, it also shortens the time interval and thus improves the patient’s experience,” Aguilar said in a news conference in New York. “So forcing health care providers to transition to another regimen that is less patient-centered is dehumanizing to the patient.”
Nevada voters in 1990 approved a ballot measure protecting the right to abortion through 24 weeks gestation. That measure could only be undone by a similar voter referendum. Lawmakers in Carson City this session, however, have worked to advance a measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.
If passed, SJR 7 would again need to clear both chambers of the Nevada Legislature in the 2025 session before it would be put on the 2027 general election ballot.
The Sun's news services contributed to this report.
