- This is the beginning of a national ban.
Don't let them use your desire to get rid of abortion
to trap ourselves into massive government overreach.
If it makes it to the level of the Supreme Court,
the next culture war
is against birth control, hormone replacement.
They decide that a certain vaccine
should not have been FDA approved.
There are so many sweeping implications
undermining the entity that keeps our medication safe.
A very dangerous maneuver.
There is a current decision pending
for a lawsuit which was filed in Texas
that could drastically affect access to a medication
commonly used for management of miscarriage
and induced abortion,
even in places where it's legal.
Even people who are opposed to abortion
should be closely following,
and in my opinion, vocally opposing this.
Despite the judge in this case
encouraging both legal teams
not to publicize anything about these hearings,
I think the precedent
that a potential favorable ruling could set
is incredibly important
for the general public to be aware of.
Let's talk about it.
(upbeat music)
Mifepristone is the medication on the docket here.
It's an anti-progesterone tablet
that's used typically in combination
with another type of medication either for induced abortion
or the treatment of a miscarriage,
and is typically used in the first trimester,
though there are other applications for it as well.
A subset of the Group Alliance for Defending Freedom
has filed this suit against the FDA,
claiming that the medication Mifepristone
was not sufficiently proven safe
prior to it being FDA approved back in 2000.
For reference, Tylenol kills about 600 people
in the United States every single year,
and this is 13 over the course of 21 years,
so I find it curious that when we talk about this lawsuit,
you're going to hear them arguing
that this medication is not safe enough to be FDA approved,
while Tylenol is over-the-counter.
It does not make comparative sense.
I'm editing and I wish I would've said here
that, in my opinion, the comparison doesn't make sense
for the reason that this was not filed
on a concern for the actual safety of the medication.
For reference,
the ADF is a religious and political activist group.
They've been labeled a hate group by the SPLC
for some of the things that they advocate for,
and they are highly funded
to the tune of $79 million in 2021,
and they paid 0% taxes on any of that, for what it's worth.
Instead of paying taxes,
they allegedly use their money
doing things like providing legal funds
to someone who is trying to remove custody
from a child's parent because she is a lesbian,
or giving advice to political activist groups in Belize
on how to make sure gay sex remains a criminal offense
punishable by 10 years in prison,
or even making sure that businesses in the United States
have the right to discriminate
on who they provide services to,
and most recently, they have used that tax-exempt money
to file a suit against the FDA,
claiming that Mifepristone should not be approved
for use in the United States.
They've done something here called forum shopping,
which is really common with these activist groups,
where they look for a place to file the suit
where they are pretty well guaranteed a favorable ruling.
For this one, they chose a district in northern Texas
that is overseen by a judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk.
I do not know if I am pronouncing that correct,
and quite honestly, I'm not sure that I care.
He interestingly oversees the district
where I was born and raised
and where I went to medical school,
and he shares a lot of the ideologies of the ADF
that we discussed earlier.
The reason that they chose his district
is not purely because he shares the ideologies of the ADF.
It's because he shares the ideologies of the ADF
but also he's the only judge in this district,
so filing their means,
they are guaranteed that it will be heard by him.
There is absolutely no other relation to Texas
for this suit.
This district and my state were chosen
purely because he's there and he will hear it,
and they think it will be ruled in their favor if he does.
Before I jump into the Texas case,
let me explain a little bit about Mifepristone
and the current regulations that are around prescribing it
in the United States.
Mifepristone has been shown repeatedly
in studies from around the globe to be safe.
Mortality rates, meaning your risk of dying
related to the use of Mifepristone
are about 0.53 in 100,000,
although if you look at the report
that that number comes from,
it's actually probably quite a bit lower,
like 0.27 in 100,000.
The reason I say that is because in their report,
they looked at 21 years of medication use.
They found in that timeframe 26 deaths,
but if you break down those deaths,
seven of those were related
to drug overdose or intoxication,
meaning illegal drug use, not the Mifepristone,
three from homicide, one from suicide,
one from a known underlying health condition,
and one from a pulmonary thromboembolism
or a blood clot in the lung,
which is a risk of pregnancy itself.
So that's technically 13 deaths in 21 years
over the course of 4.9 million medication uses
for a death rate of 0.27 in 100,000.
For reference, pregnancy has a mortality rate
of about 8.8 in 100,000, which is 15 times higher.
Penicillin has a mortality rate of two in 100,000,
which is four times higher,
and interestingly, Viagra has a mortality rate
of four in 100,000, which is eight times higher.
When you look at morbidity or serious adverse events
related to the use of Mifepristone,
and you're looking at a rate of about 0.8%,
this is going to include things like hospitalization
or need for a blood transfusion,
infection, things like that.
These are almost always treatable
without long-term sequelae or problems,
and if you took those parameters
and applied it to pregnancy as a whole,
you would be looking at a risk of a serious adverse event
that was tens if not a hundred times higher
than the risk associated with the use of this medication.
They've had the hearings to hear this suit
last week as of the time of filming this,
and the judge has not issued a final decision yet,
but it's expected that that will be coming quite soon,
possibly even this week,
so it may happen even before I get this video out,
but I wanna go through some of the things
that the ADF claimed.
Claim number one.
The ADF has claimed that mailing Mifepristone
should be illegal on the basis of the Comstock Act of 1873,
which says Mifepristone is obscene material
which should be illegal to mail.
US DOJ countered with a whole slip opinion,
which I will link in the resources down below.
To sum it up, though,
they said that it would be inappropriate
to make mailing a medication illegal
in a particular jurisdiction
due to the multitude of legal ways
that the medication is used.
Claim number two, Mifepristone is actually unsafe
and should have never been approved in the first place.
The DOJ countered
and basically said there is absolutely no legal precedent
for removing a long-standing FDA approval on a medication,
and that makes sense, right?
That's why the FDA exists.
They review that data,
and they remove approvals or add them as is appropriate.
Besides that, we've already established
that this is patently false.
This medication is used around the world
and we've gone through the actual safety data here.
This was first approved in France in 1988
after two very large clinical trials showed that it was safe
and no data has come out since then
that would make us think anything other than that.
Claim number three.
The FDA failed to study the safety of this medication
and ignored harmful side effects.
There are many studies on this.
I will link a lot of resources down below
if you want to look into them, but it's just patently false.
Claim number four.
An increase in complications
has caused other patients in emergency rooms
to suffer from a decrease in time, attention, and resources
from their doctors.
Myself and probably the DOJ responded by saying
thank you for sharing that very interesting
and baseless thought that your brain had.
Please do come back when you can support it with any data.
Claim number five.
Because of this medication,
doctors have lost the opportunity
to provide medical care through a pregnancy.
The medications are both so unsafe
that patients are being hauled in by the truckload,
necessitating the use of our services
to the point that we are not extending care
to other patients and simply ignoring them,
but also we're losing business because of them.
Kacsmaryk appeared in the hearings
to be unsurprisingly quite sympathetic
to the claims being brought forth by this activist group,
but again, he has yet to issue a final decision
as of the time of filming this.
That being said,
in the likely event that a favorable ruling comes out,
the next step will probably be to appeal.
It certainly will be appealed,
and that would likely elevate the case
to a Louisiana Circuit Court,
which is known to be also quite conservative.
That was likely also in the plan
when they were doing the forum shopping
for where to submit this.
Upholding there could potentially mean
that this precedent-setting ruling would end up
in front of the Supreme Court.
As far as abortion goes,
make no mistake that this is the beginning
of a national ban.
If they can get Mifepristone pulled from FDA approval,
that means that even in states
where abortion is still legal,
you won't be able to have access to this medication.
I said earlier
that I think even people who are opposed to abortion
should be vocally opposing such a ruling,
and the reason is because
we don't have a precedent for this.
If it makes it to the level of the Supreme Court
and gets approved as precedent,
the implications for that are massive.
It could mean that these highly-funded activist groups
will decide that their next culture war
is going to be against birth control,
or maybe they decide that a certain vaccine
should not have been FDA approved,
and they bring a suit against that,
and suddenly no more mRNA vaccines.
It could be against hormone replacement,
which is used for a huge variety of different problems
from premature ovarian failure to menopause to trans people
and a myriad of conditions in between.
There are so many wide-sweeping implications
that a favorable ruling,
especially if it elevates to the level of the SCOTUS,
could cause,
and I think we should all be really wary
of both who is funding this
as well as what the broader implications are.
Don't let them use your desire to get rid of abortion
to trap ourselves
into being okay with massive government overreach.
There's a reason the FDA
and their team of scientists and experts review this data
and make these decisions,
and there's a reason
that we don't have a history of lawsuits like this,
because this isn't a safe manner of decision-making.
The person who will issue this decision
is not capable of assessing
the actual medical necessity or safety of this medication.
They are operating completely out of bias,
and that's not how judges are supposed to operate,
but when you have a biased organization
that's incredibly highly funded,
bringing the information to people
they know will agree with them on the basis of bias,
that is not a democratic way of making decisions,
and it's also not a safe way for assessing
what medications people have access to.
This is an unreasonable legislative attempt
to take control of medication safety
away from medical entities
and put it in the hands of highly-funded activist groups.
Undermining the entity that keeps our medications safe
and access to them effective
is a very counterproductive and dangerous maneuver.
I ask that you pay attention to what's going on,
and yeah, I don't know.
(sighs) That's all.