Supreme Court Takes Mifepristone Case

In the year 2000, the FDA approved mifepristone as a safe and effective drug. Mifepristone is a abortion pill typically used for medical abortions or to complete partial miscarriages in the first trimester of pregnancy. 

Last year, anti-abortion crusaders sued to have the drug removed from the market, saying the FDA had acted too quickly. Mind you, this is a drug that has been used all over the world since the 1990s, and which has undergone multiple clinical trials, all showing it is safe to use, with side effects occurring in less than one percent of patients.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. The petitioner for the medication (which is on the WHO's list of essential medications) have also asked the Court to decide whether the anti-abortion crusaders have standing to sue.

“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.

The anti-abortion crowd are not being harmed by this medication, which none of them have taken (or at least none of them will admit to have taken). No, what is being harmed is their ability to force other people to do as they are told -- told, that is, by these anti-abortion fanatics. 

What is being harmed is their ability to control the lives of other people. 

They believe they should be given the power to control the lives of those they consider inferior -- women, the poor, the working class, LGBTQ people. Not being allowed to control the bodies of those groups is the harm being done to them. And that -- not zygotes or fetuses -- is their real concern. If women and the working class and poor people and LGBTQ people are allowed to control their own bodies, they might begin to think they can control their own lives. They might even think they should have civil rights and equal protection under the law. 

This is also why they're infuriated by trans people. If people are men or women because they say they're men or woman, well, how will these people know which people are by nature inferior and subject to control? 

This is why they get more furious about trans women than they do about trans men (although they also hate trans men, don't worry). Trans women violate their belief about how the world works. Trans women both are and are not an inferior gender -- if they're women, they should be controlled; if they're men, they should do the controlling. But to control a trans woman -- how can they do that? 

Traditionally they have controlled women through rape, the threat of rape; forced pregnancy and the threat of forced pregnancy; and violence. They can't force trans women into pregnancy, and while they can threaten rape, that's another conflict for this group, since they don't want to admit rape exists. 

They can, of course, still use violence and the threat of violence, which they do. And they can and do use the legal system as a form of violence -- to control trans women (and trans men) by that method. Hence all the fucking laws being put in place over the past few years.

I've avoided using the word "conservative" to talk about these people. They aren't conservatives. They're reactionaries and fascists. They don't want to conserve. They want to control, and they are perfectly happy to strip away the civil rights of others as well as to drive this country back to the nineteenth century if that is what it takes to allow them to control those they consider property.