Team Trump/Barr Seeks "Emergency" Stay Of COVID-19 Risk Abatement Procedure... As A Collateral Attack On Family Planning Rights.

In Pennsylvania earlier this summer, the ACLU won a nation-wide injunction against the Trump Administration's attempt to single out so-called abortion pills' provision requirements, during the pendency of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump affirmatively changed rules, or at least continued to allow many drugs with significant side-effect risks, to be received at home, and taken -- without need to actually visit a doctors' office, or a hospital, in order to reduce the risk of virus transmission, while obtaining the drugs by in-person visits. Trump would not grant that same relief to. . . abortion pills. [If Trump's administration thinks it too great a risk to have to visit a public doctor's office to get say a heart med refill. . . it is per force discriminatory to impose that burden only on family planning drugs.]

The ACLU rightly pointed out in its various legal filings on this matter, that by making life-threatening viral exposure risks a condition of treatment for medication abortion and miscarriage care, the FDA's continued maintenance of the Mifepristone In-Person Dispensing Requirements jeopardizes the safety of patients, clinicians, and the public at large, with no countervailing benefit -- and with particularly severe implications for low-income people and people of color, who comprise a disproportionate share of impacted patients -- and who are already suffering and dying from COVID-19 at substantially higher rates, than the general population.

And so, an able USDC Judge in Philadelphia enjoined the Trump camp from singling out abortion meds, for a requirement to visit one's doctor in person, to obtain the same.

Overnight, Bill Barr and the Trump lawyers asked the Supremes, on an emergency basis, to suspend the appellate affirmance of relevant court's injunction (by entering a new stay) -- and force women to go to doctors' offices to get the pills. Here is that bat-sh!ttery-infused filing:

. . . .The district court. . . enjoined the enforcement of those longstanding safety regulations on a nationwide basis for the pendency of the COVID-19 pandemic, holding they pose an undue burden on abortion access under Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), because of the potential costs associated with visiting a clinic during the pandemic. In a one-sentence order, the court of appeals declined to stay that injunction, thereby allowing a single district judge to dictate national safety requirements for medication abortion in the middle of the current public-health emergency [note that this gets it exactly. . . backwards, here -- he simply ruled that if FDA thought it safer to stay home to get medicines, then that should apply to. . . all similarly situated medicines]. . . .

The lower courts are right -- and the Supremes will agree. There is a firm constitutional right to autonomy, in family planning decisions -- and safety from viral infection. In may ways, this is Trump/Barr openly criminalizing poverty, by trying to interfere with private, constitutionally-protected family planning decisions -- in sum, to attempt to so regulate a woman's uterus (to the exclusion of men's scrotums -- they don't require a doctor's visit to get a. . . jimmy). . . yup, it is all pretty darn. . . deplorable. Onward, as I am apparently in a bit of a mood, today(!). Apologies for the coarse language.

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