By Dave Andrusko
On September 12, NRLC made a made a major contribution to educating the public in a White Paper that challenged the media’s coverage of a ruling handed down by U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: What the Media Missed in Its Coverage of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Decision Regarding Mifepristone. The White Paper was written by Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC’s director of Education & Research.
When the U.S. Fifth Circuit handed down its decision on the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. the U.S, Food & Drug Administration (AHM v. FDA) last month challenging the government’s actions on mifepristone, the abortion pill, it was big news, and the media covered it as such.
The media dutifully reported that the court allowed the original approval of the drug to stand, saying the challenge had been filed too late, and kept approval for the generic in place. However, the three judge panel also said the FDA had not provided sufficient justification for the relaxations it made to the regulations governing the distribution and use of the drug in 2018 and 2021 that pretty much authorized online sales and mailing the drugs to women’s homes.
But that was pretty much where the media left things, except for passing on the usual claims that scientific studies by abortion advocates reviewed by the FDA had found the drugs absolutely safe and effective, giving the impression that the court’s decision was an unwarranted political one.
Read through the decision, though, and you’ll see that there was ample evidence of the pills’ threat to the lives of both the mother and the unborn child. The court says that the FDA never adequately tested the protocol changes it recommended and gave abortion pill promoters undue deference at the expense of the patients whose interests the agency was supposed to protect.
This White Paper from the NRLC Educational Trust Fund details and documents these oversights and many of the other things the media missed in its reporting on this critical case, which will probably end up at the Supreme Court sometime in the next term.
What the Media Missed in Its Coverage of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Decision Regarding Mifepristone can be accessed here.