Center for Reproductive Rights takes legal action to block North Dakota attack on women’s health, abortion rights
Lawsuit challenges a new state law that would ban all medication abortions
(PRESS RELEASE) A North Dakota law that introduces new and unnecessary restrictions on the safe
and common use of FDA-approved drugs to induce first-trimester abortions would,
in fact, ban medication abortions entirely, according to a lawsuit filed today
by the Center for Reproductive Rights seeking to block the law from taking
effect as scheduled on August 1.
CRR
advocates say the state is taking away an option widely recognized as safe and
effective by the World Health Organization, the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other medical experts and professional
organizations—and needlessly forcing all women seeking abortions to undergo a
surgical abortion procedure even when such a procedure may be medically
inadvisable.
“North Dakota has enacted a law that defies reason, science, and the
expertise of doctors worldwide in an underhanded effort to deny women their
legal right to terminate a pregnancy safely, early, and in accordance with
their doctors’ advice and their own wishes,” said
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It is unimaginable that any
other medical procedures would be targeted for restrictions aimed at reducing
their effectiveness and increasing their expense and inconvenience. This is an
assault on women’s reproductive rights and health, pure and simple.”
The Center
for Reproductive Rights has been joined by the law firms Weil, Gotshal &, Manges LLP and Turman
&, Lang Ltd.
in bringing the lawsuit on behalf of the only reproductive health care clinic
providing abortion services in North Dakota and the clinic’s medical director.
The suit alleges
that North Dakota House Bill 1297, passed in 2011, is incomprehensible and
completely misconstrues the role of the federal Food and Drug Administration in
approving drugs for the market.
While the
law as written aims to restrict the two drugs used in medication abortion
procedures to their uses as tested and authorized by the FDA, the FDA takes no
such role in drug testing and imposes no such limits itself.
And while the
protocol used by the North Dakota health care providers to perform medication
abortions is in accordance with the best available medical evidence, the law
attempts to restrict medication abortions strictly to the regimen on the FDA-approved
drug labels. The FDA itself acknowledges
that its approval of a drug label for marketing purposes is not intended to
restrict alternative “off-label” use—and that good medicine often requires such
use.
According to the American Cancer Society, most
oncologists prescribe off-label uses of various drugs to treat their patients,
and the Archive of Internal Medicine says such off-label uses account for 21
percent of all prescriptions.
“No other provision of North Dakota law denies
access to off-label prescriptions, and there are, in fact, provisions that
actually seek to protect off-label uses of other medications,” said Suzanne
Novak, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead counsel
on the case. “Doctors around the world and the FDA itself recognize that
off-label prescription is responsible for important advances in medical care.
It is precisely these advances that the state is trying to deny North Dakota
women.”
