RFK Jr. Finally Gets Around to Bringing His War on Medical Science to Abortion
But lawsuits aren’t enough for the increasingly antsy anti-abortion movement: Their allies control the White House, after all. Why not just use the machinery of the administration to restrict mifepristone out of accessibility?
Kennedy is finally responding. By leaning on the bogus study, FDA might decide that mifepristone is unusually dangerous and reimpose the in-person dispensing requirements, making it impossible for red-state patients to legally obtain the medication. It could go even further and try to yank mifepristone’s approval altogether.
Read more at Talking Points Memo
RFK Jr.’s Tylenol attack insults women’s intelligence (commentary)
But Kennedy did not invent this schtick of trying to rebrand misogyny as feminism through trolling and feigning “concern” for women and children’s safety. His tactics owe a lot to the anti-abortion movement, which spent decades repackaging their efforts to destroy women’s rights as a crusade to “protect” them from supposedly evil doctors eager to inflict abortions on them. The Christian right used fake science — and even faker “concern” for women — to restrict access to abortion, and then used those lies to end abortion rights altogether. Kennedy has now adopted the same techniques not only for his anti-vaccine crusade, but also to attack health care that is vital for pregnant women.
Read more at Salon
The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way? (opinion)
The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data. The report appears to have dramatically inflated the rate of serious adverse health outcomes in patients who took mifepristone – in part by seemingly conflating the bleeding that occurs in the normal course of a medication abortion with hemorrhaging, and in part by relying on unclear terminology. The Ethics and Public Policy Center report classified “serious adverse events” as occurring in almost 11% of mifepristone patients. More reliable studies, subject to data transparency, peer review, and a more rigorously honest set of definitions, have found that such adverse health events happen in fewer than 0.5% of users.
Read more at The Guardian