Bob Ferguson asks Spokane judge for swift decision on abortion pill lawsuit against FDA
Washington’s attorney general is asking a federal judge in Spokane to swiftly decide a lawsuit the state filed against the Food and Drug Administration last year and roll back restrictions on a pill commonly used in abortions.
Bob Ferguson and his counterpart in Oregon, Ellen Rosenblum, led a group of 11 Democratic state attorneys general in a lawsuit filed in February 2023 seeking to expand access to mifepristone, a drug used to terminate a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks. If U.S. District Court Judge Thomas O. Rice approves the motion for summary judgment Ferguson filed late Thursday, the case could be resolved without a trial.
“We are continuing to fight for reproductive freedom, including access to mifepristone,” Ferguson, who is running for governor, said in a statement Friday. “The FDA must remove its unnecessary and unlawful restrictions on this safe and effective medication. Attacks on scientifically proven abortion medication won’t cease, but we will keep fighting for the right to access mifepristone in Washington.”
Mifepristone is one of two drugs typically used to terminate a pregnancy, which together represented 63% of abortions performed in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. It is also used to treat miscarriages and other complications that can arise from pregnancy.
Ferguson and his fellow attorneys general argue that mifepristone, which the FDA first approved in 2000, is safer than widely available drugs like Tylenol and should not be subject to current restrictions that allow only certain medical providers to prescribe it. Rice granted a preliminary injunction in April 2023, ordering that the drug must remain available while Ferguson’s lawsuit runs its course.
In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned nationwide abortion rights and allowed states to restrict the procedure, antiabortion activists have taken aim at pills that can be mailed across state lines to terminate a pregnancy. In June, the Supreme Court threw out a competing lawsuit that sought to restrict the pill’s use, with the nine justices ruling unanimously that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue because they weren’t personally harmed by mifepristone being available.
Before the preliminary injunction in Spokane, Washington state bought a three-year supply of mifepristone in anticipation of a federal court in Texas banning the medication. When Ferguson filed the lawsuit, Kristin Beneski, Washington’s first assistant attorney general, told The Spokesman-Review that the stage’s top lawyer had chosen to file it in the Eastern District of Washington because the impact of banning the drug would be most pronounced in Eastern Washington, which has fewer abortion providers than the state’s west side and borders Idaho, which banned abortion in virtually all cases when the Supreme Court allowed it to do so.