Gov. Maura Healey will join reproductive rights advocates today on the steps of the State House to unveil her administration’s response to the ruling of a Texas judge which effectively bans the use of a common abortion drug nationally.
“Tomorrow, Governor Maura T. Healey will announce her administration’s plan to protect access to mifepristone in Massachusetts following a federal court ruling that blocked the FDA’s approval of the abortion medication drug that has been used safely and effectively for decades,” Healey’s administration announced Sunday.
Healey is scheduled to appear alongside U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Lt. Gov Kim Driscoll, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, state Senate President Karen Spilka and others at 1 p.m on Monday, when her staff says she will respond to the Friday decision by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the country’s most common method of abortion.
The Cambridge Democrat will use “executive action and other steps to ensure supply of mifepristone and protections for patients and providers,” a spokesperson told the Herald Sunday. According to her staff, Healey will also be joined Monday by representatives from Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, Reproductive Equity Now, and the American Civil Liberties Union of MA.
Any executive action comes close on the heels of a Friday assertion by the governor that women in Massachusetts will not be stripped of their ability to access a medication that the FDA approved for use in 2000 and which the government agency says has been used safely by millions.
“The estimated number of women who have used mifepristone in the U.S. for medical termination of pregnancy through the end of June 2022 is approximately 5.6 million women,” the FDA wrote in a Mifepristone U.S. Post-Marketing Adverse Events Summary.
The governor, on Friday, called the pill the “gold standard” in reproductive care and the attempt to reverse the FDA’s approval a naked effort to end women’s access to abortion altogether.
“This is yet another attempt by extremists to ban abortion nationwide. But we are prepared to take immediate action to protect access to this important medication,” Healey said. “Patients in Massachusetts will continue to have access to mifepristone. We stand for civil rights and freedom, and we will always protect access to reproductive health care.”
Marketed under the name Mifeprex, mifepristone can be used to prevent a potential pregnancy from becoming viable, according to manufacturer Danco Laboratories, by blocking the production of the hormone progesterone, “a naturally produced hormone that prepares the lining of the uterus for a fertilized egg and helps maintain pregnancy. Without progesterone the pregnancy cannot continue.”
Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, issued his ruling just as U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, unveiled an opposing decision in a case out of Washington state. The competing rulings almost guarantee the question of mifepristone’s legality will land before the same U.S. Supreme Court which last year overturned Roe v. Wade.
In arguing against the abortion pill’s approval, lawyers for Alliance Defending Freedom, which was also involved in the Mississippi case leading to the end of Roe, said that during the drug’s initial approval the FDA had failed to adequately review its safety.
Lawyers arguing in favor of the pill’s use attempted to demonstrate to the judge it is safer than common procedures like wisdom teeth removal and colonoscopies — safer, even, than pregnancy itself — but Kacsmaryk was not convinced, saying the drug’s use must end nationwide in a week.
The U.S. Department of Justice has appealed the judge’s ruling.
