“I’m not even going to really talk about the abortion question, but I do want to point out that there are potential implications to maternal health that go beyond unrelated to abortion,” said Louisiana Health Officer Dr. Joe Kanter of a case currently being considered by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
The case is Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which was filed in November. This focuses on mifepristone, medication that has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for years.
In April, a Texas judge decided in favor of the plaintiffs to halt FDA approval of the drug.
“You know, the backstory to this -- this was approved by the FDA in 2000,” Kanter explained. “The FDA… did an expansion to the approval a little bit in 2016. And then earlier in the year, a U.S. district judge in Amarillo, Texas, issued a pretty sweeping ruling that declared the whole approval process was void and kind of made the drug off limits. The Fifth Circuit made a compromise on that, and then the Supreme Court held that and sent it back down to the Fifth Circuit. So that’s where it is now.”
There was a hearing on the case this week by the appeals court.
According to Kanter, the health risks of limiting access to mifepristone – which works by blocking a hormone called progesterone that is needed for a pregnancy to develop – are substantial.
“Mifepristone is often used to treat miscarriage itself,” he said, adding that “miscarriage is much more common than people realize about one in four, one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage, and oftentimes it’s before the woman even knows they’re pregnant.”
When a miscarriage occurs, there is a risk that some of the “fetal products might not be spontaneously expelled,” said Kanter. That leads to infection risk.
“We see women come into the hospital septic because of this,” said the doctor, referring the life-threatening condition septic shock. “So, a treatment for miscarriage is assuring that all of the fetal products have been expelled.”
Pregnancy and childbirth are already risky propositions for women. An analysis of U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from Government Accountability Office last October found that there was a sharp increase in maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021. In November, the Center for American Progress reported that abortion bans would likely result in more women dying.
“One of the concerns in this ruling is that if this medication – if this Fifth Circuit were to rule or to agree with this judge out of Texas that the medication should be banned, then it would hinder miscarriage care and that that would be a far-reaching consequence,” said Kanter. “And that’s one of my main interests in following this case right now.”
Listen to Kanter’s full conversation with Normand here.
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