An Amarillo judge has halted the Biden administration’s agenda regarding immigration, gender and sexuality issues, minors’ access to birth control, and could soon revoke federal approval of abortion pills.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has blocked federal policies purportedly meant to protect migrants seeking asylum, along with policies that allowed teenagers to obtain birth control for free without parental consent at clinics funded by the federal government, according to Bloomberg Law.
In November, Kacsmaryk ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on health care providers discriminating on “the basis of sex” does not apply to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
“I’m hard-pressed to think of a federal judge who has had a greater impact in less time,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as reported by Bloomberg.
Kacsmaryk was appointed by President Donald Trump as a federal trial court judge in the Northern District of Texas in 2019.
The judge will soon rule on Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a case that will give him the opportunity to remove the federal approval of mifepristone — a key component used in chemical abortions.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling could effectively halt the sale of abortion pills nationwide.
On Thursday, he ordered Danco Laboratories, an abortion pill manufacturer, to detail its argument for why the lawsuit seeking to pull mifepristone from the U.S. market should be rejected.
“Briefing will then be closed on the matter, absent any ‘exceptional or extraordinary circumstance,’” the judge wrote in his order, according to CNBC.
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a coalition of anti-abortion doctors who filed the lawsuit against the FDA in November, will have until February 24 to respond.
Shaina Goodman, director for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families, said this move is “a very deliberate, coordinated strategy by the anti-abortion movement to attack abortion every which way they can, and they’ve found in Kacsmaryk a judge who has a track record of making decisions based not on law or evidence, but on partisan ideology,” as reported by The Guardian.
“Chemical abortion drugs are dangerous for pregnant women and girls,” said Julie Marie Blake, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, representing the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in the lawsuit.
“Our lawsuit seeks to ensure safety protections by stopping the use of these drugs for chemical abortions,” Blake said, according to LifeNews. “The use of the drugs for chemical abortions should never have been legalized without proper study of the dangers such drugs may present to young women and girls.”
The question is, “how are chemical (pill) abortions dangerous?”. Reporting only partial information is not providing full disclosure to the public.