Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Mifepristone is a home abortion drug that is widely regarded as safe to use. Unless you're a Texas judge or any number of people who really like to control women and want to use safe abortion methods as a tool to do so.

A case will be going before the Supreme Court for them to decide whether or not mifepristone is safe. The contention is that the FDA did not go through a proper study and trial to determine whether or not the drug was safe before authorizing it to be used as an abortificant. The Texas judge ruled that the FDA was derelict in this and that the drug could not be prescribed for this purpose. It was immediately appealed and bounced up to the SCOTUS and the judge's ruling put on hold pending this review.

At least there's a few women on the Supreme Court (thank you Sandra!), and not just a bunch of old white guys, though there's several of those there too.

So today's news!

Publisher of scientific journals, Sage, has retracted three papers that question the safety of mifepristone, two of which are kind of key to the case about to come up in the Supreme Court - Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA. Multiple problems were cited, amongst which: flawed statistics, the authors claiming to have no bias when they worked for the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization, etc. Two of the three papers, by the same primary researcher, pulled from the same study pool which was not well-organized. When the statistics were re-evaluated, it was found that the morbidity rate was 0.3%, about the same as studies evaluating the safety of the drug that are of an unbiased nature.

The hearing before the Supreme Court is scheduled for March 26. It'll be interesting to see if they can make much of an argument with three major papers knocked out from under them.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/anti-abortion-groups-studies-retracted-before-supreme-court-mifepristone-case/