Photo Courtesy of Caroline Willis/Mayoral Photography Office
“The decision last week was nothing more than an assault on women’s rights by a Trump-appointed judge in Texas simply set on trampling the law instead of upholding it,” said Mayor Adams.
By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Corporation Counsel Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix on Wednesday announced that the City of New York has co-led a coalition of cities and counties from around the nation that operate public health-care systems in a legal filing to protect safe access to medication abortions nationwide.
In an amicus brief filed in Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, New York City and the coalition of local governments signal their strong support for the federal government’s application for an emergency stay of a federal district court’s ruling that — starting this Friday — would put a hold on the FDA’s 2000 approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone. In their brief, the coalition argues that the district court’s order undermines public health because it will harm already overburdened public hospitals without realizing the detrimental impact it would have on health care for residents of each locality, as well as makes baseless claims that medication abortion is unsafe.
For more than 20 years, mifepristone, used in combination with the drug misoprostol, has been a safe option for those managing an abortion or miscarriage in the United States, and has now become the most common method to terminate a pregnancy in the country. But, last Friday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas — a Donald Trump appointee — issued a ruling effectively making the prescription of mifepristone illegal nationwide, including here in New York City, starting this Friday, barring emergency relief being ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
In their brief, New York City and the coalition warn that withdrawing federal approval of mifepristone would gravely harm public health care systems across the country that are still struggling with severe funding and staffing challenges following the COVID-19 pandemic. The amicus highlights how the district court’s decision will aggravate those challenges, making it harder for residents, including the most vulnerable, to access care of all kinds, and ultimately undermine the very community health that local governments are charged with protecting.
As argued in the brief, if medication abortion is suddenly removed as an option for health-care providers and their patients, demands placed on public hospitals will increase. Public hospitals, in turn, would then have to divert resources to meet the increased demand for emergency care and for procedural abortions from their existing patients and from new patients who otherwise would have sought care from providers who cannot pivot to providing procedural abortions.
Because public hospitals operate with limited resources, the impact of the district court’s decision will not be confined to only patients seeking abortions, or even just those seeking reproductive health care. Thousands of patients in need of all kinds of non-emergency surgical care will find themselves facing significant delays in obtaining procedures, and some may forgo care altogether. Reducing the ability of public hospitals to provide resource-effective, high-quality care will erode patients’ confidence in care and make the provision of health care to already-vulnerable patients even more difficult. If left in place, the district court’s decision could undermine public health services across the board.
“The decision last week was nothing more than an assault on women’s rights by a Trump-appointed judge in Texas simply set on trampling the law instead of upholding it,” Adams said.
