The Quickie: PP Responds to Unprecedented 5th Circuit Mifepristone Case Decision

Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.

In today’s Quickie: PP responds to 5th Circuit mifepristone decision, FL House to vote on 6-week abortion ban today, new HIPAA rule proposed, and PP storyteller discusses activism. 

PP RESPONDS TO 5TH CIRCUIT MIFEPRISTONE CASE DECISION: In the middle of the night, a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel largely denied the Biden administration’s request to issue a stay of the district court ruling in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, meaning that the FDA’s approval of mifepristone is still in grave jeopardy. Just moments ago, the Department of Justice announced they will be appealing the 5th Circuit's ruling to the Supreme Court. However, the courts’ orders have not yet taken effect, leaving abortion access intact for now.

No court has ever ordered the FDA to take a medication off the market because of their own judgment about the safety of the medication. If allowed to take effect, the ruling could devastate the ability of patients to access the drug for medication abortion and miscarriage care nationwide — even in states where abortion remains legal — and disrupt the FDA’s process for approving essential drugs.

In fact, 650 individuals, companies, and groups filed briefs this week urging the 5th Circuit to keep access to medication abortion. This attack isn't about mifepristone’s safety. Instead, it is a transparent attempt by anti-abortion activists to use the judicial system to ban abortion nationwide.

“We are furious that yet another court would choose to jeopardize the health and futures of the millions of people who rely on mifepristone for abortion care,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Alexis McGill Johnson said. “This baseless case is a politically motivated attack to further restrict access to abortion that will place care out of reach for patients — and we will not stand for it. The federal judiciary has — for the second time this week — rejected science and the law, and this time, the court decided they had the authority to re-write mifepristone’s label. If allowed to stand, the consequences of this decision will be catastrophic not just for medication abortion access, but the entire drug approval system."

Read more at the Washington Post. PPFA release.

TODAY: FL HOUSE TO VOTE ON SIX-WEEK ABORTION BAN: Today, the Florida House of Representatives is slated to vote on SB 300, a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people even know they are pregnant. Throughout the session, champions for reproductive freedom have filed dozens of amendments to mitigate the ban’s harms. In the Senate, all amendments — more than 50 of them! — were rejected. Reproductive rights champions  are taking the same tactic in the House today, showing their fellow lawmakers that they cannot vote away Floridians’ reproductive freedom without resistance. Floor debate on the bill started at 11 AM ET and can be watched at The Florida Channel. 

Gov. DeSantis has indicated he will sign the near-total abortion ban. This near-total abortion ban will not take effect immediately upon Gov. DeSantis’s signature, but after the Florida Supreme Court court rules to undermine or eliminate Florida’s constitutional right to privacy. Such a decision could come as early as this summer in response to abortion providers’ challenge to Florida’s current ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which remains pending before the Florida Supreme Court. 

If this ban goes into effect, it would decimate a critical abortion access point for millions across the southeast, Caribbean, and Central and South America. Planned Parenthood and its allies plan to fight against the ban and work to ensure people can get access to basic health care in Florida. 

Read more about the impact of Florida’s current abortion ban at the Washington Post. Read more about SB 300 at The Guardian, VICE, and WFLA. 

PP APPLAUDS BIDEN ADMIN FOR PROPOSED RULE STRENGTHENING HIPAA PROTECTIONS: Yesterday, the Biden administration announced additional protections under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to safeguard reproductive health data, a critically important step amidst ongoing attacks that have jeopardized the privacy of patients and health care providers. Important modifications proposed by this rule include: 

• Better protections for people’s private health information from being used against them when they seek legal reproductive health care.
• Ensuring patients can be open and honest with their providers about all of the care they have received, without fear that an anti-reproductive health state could use that information against them in an investigation, criminal prosecution, or civil or administrative proceeding.

“This welcome action is a major, necessary step to protect patient privacy and ensure that health care providers can do their jobs, and limit political interference in patients’ access to care,” Alexis McGill Johnson, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. “We are in the midst of a public health crisis, where politically-motivated politicians hostile to our rights and freedoms are attacking every facet of reproductive health care, from abortion access to birth control. Everyone, no matter where they live or how much money they have, should be able to access the health care they need, free of fear that their health information will be compromised.”

Read more at Bloomberg Law. PPFA release.

“THIS IS A HUMAN RIGHTS FIGHT”: In the final episode of PPFA’s partnership with White Picket Fence, Planned Parenthood storyteller Nancy Davis joined the podcast to discuss the future of parental activism in the post-Dobbs landscape. Nancy particularly emphasized the importance of collective action to create a better future:

“Now, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I feel everyone, every single person bears the brunt of it. That being men, families, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, you name it. This is not just a women’s fight, this is a human rights fight, and if we don’t collectively stand together, there’s no way that we will be granted change.

I feel we have to look at the laws that are actually standing and ask ourselves, are they being productive or are they being unproductive? Are they helping people, or are they hurting people? … And from that assessment, we need to make the necessary changes. I mean, we were all given the choice of free will. So who is anyone to take our freedom away?”

Listen to the full episode here, and listen to previous episodes here.