She’s a Mom, Not a Scam? A Tale of Two Microscopic Faces: The Case of Mifepristone
Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is a co-author of “Say it Loud: AnIllustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks about politics, sports and culture on Philadelphia’s 900AM. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
I learned from my experiences that every loss is important. Women need access to counseling and medicines to heal and it includes the drug Mifepristone. What we don’t need is to be criminalized by politicians and punitive reproductive laws that have long been out of step with public opinion. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of US adults think that abortion should be legalized in all or most cases.
Several women I spoke to recently said they were going to go with someone else to buy my medicine for me if I set up a secret meet-up with a stranger. Nor did I have to order mifepristone online and find myself navigating the many scammers taking advantage of the current patchwork of state abortion laws in the US.
I was a woman who was afraid, bleeding and in pain and desperately needed emergency medical care after my baby was born. Thanks to the administration of mifepristone, I was allowed dignity during my miscarriage. It is what every woman deserves, even if they are facing an abortion or a potentially life threatening miscarriage.
After experiencing a day of hemorrhaging in the first quarter of my pregnancy, I went to my doctor who said that the bleeding I was experiencing was an indication of a miscarriage as my blood pressure was dropping very rapidly.
The Supreme Court will rule on generic mifepristone if it fails to preserve the status quo and the public’s interest in medicine
Being prescribed a drug is part of the medical care for many women. Not so in my case: As my doctor explained, I was facing a dire medical emergency. I was grateful for the medication that saved my life.
My miscarriage took me by surprise. I had loved being pregnant the first time around, about a decade earlier. I had no reason for fear when I became pregnant a second time. By the time I received mifepristone, I was losing a life I had already begun to love. And like many other women, despite my level of education or economic status, I could not outrun the statistics that put Black women at higher risk.
After the US Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary order to preserve the status quo, ensuring access to the drug while giving the justices more time to study the issue.
In a filing with the Supreme Court, the FDA says it also believes that under the Fifth Circuit decision, generic mifepristone “would cease to be approved altogether.”
A temporary stay from the U.S. Supreme Court preserving status-quo access to mifepristone expires at 11:59 p.m. ET today unless the court intervenes. The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals may impose restrictions if the stay expires, including prohibiting the distribution of the pills by mail.
In the new lawsuit, GenBioPro objects to the FDA’s interpretation of that decision and asks a federal court to force the FDA to preserve access. The company says its generic form of the drug accounts for about two-thirds of mifepristone sold in the United States.
In a statement, Skye Perryman with the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward Foundation and one of the lawyers in the case, said the outcome could have larger significance for other medications.
“There are industry wide implications if far-right external interest groupsare able to interfere with drug availability in the country without the legal and regulatory protections provided by Congress,” Perryman said. Few companies would be incentivized to bring essential medications to market if this were to be the case.