Once again, we are seeing evidence of judicial overreach, with judges disregarding the knowledge of experts in particular fields and of scientific data that was accumulated in favor of their own predilections. We have seen this a number of times in the last few decades at every level of the court system, where judges make decisions of the basis of their own biases, throwing out the views of experts and years of legal precedent. Though the current travesties involve the issues of abortion and the safety of mifepristone, it has been seen previously in the Citizens United ruling and the removal of federal monitors at the Department of Justice from states that interfered with the voting rights of minorities. The Supreme Court decided that enough time had passed with monitoring and the states no longer needed the federal government to make certain that voting rights were observed for all citizens since the states knew the proper procedures. Of course, the Court was dead wrong and minorities were egregiously deprived in various ways of the right to vote by a number of state governments.
Last year, in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson, the conservative Supreme Court ignored a half century of precedent in overturning Roe vs Wade, making a woman’s right to abortion illegal in a 6-3 ruling. Five of the six justices who voted to overturn Roe were Catholic, with the sixth, Neil Gorsuch an Episcopalian who was raised as a Catholic. It is obvious that religious bias played a major role in outlawing abortion even though the majority of citizens in the United States are in favor of abortion rights. Several polls and state referenda have confirmed that.
The current problem is not at a Supreme Court level but comes from a district court in Texas by another Trump biased appointee who has been an outspoken opponent of abortion throughout his life. This recent egregious ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Texas court was to ban a pill used to aid in abortion that has been found to be safe and effective by the FDA for decades- mifepristone. Kacsmaryk decided that the pill had not been proven safe, overruling the experts at the FDA. But it seems beyond belief that he had the gall to question the scientific evidence provided by the FDA for the approval of mifepristone which has been used by women safely for decades in the United States. In some European nations, it has been in use even longer. This is like Trump deciding that the use of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin and disinfectants were the way to treat Covid though there was no scientific evidence these worked.
Shortly after Kacsmaryk’s decision, a judge in the state of Washington ruled that mifepristone was safe to use and should remain on the market. But since when are any judges more knowledgeable than the experts at the FDA about the use of medication. Kacsmaryk’s ruling was a clear case of judicial overreach. Neither one of these judges should be ruling on mifepristone, nor should the Supreme Court. Medical experts should be making the decisions about the safety and use of medication, not judges.
www.robertlevinebooks.com
Buy The Uninformed Voter on Amazon or Barnes and Noble
Photo 43870073 / Judge © Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com
Posted at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: abortion pills, FDA, Judge Kacsmaryk, medication safety, mifepristone, overturning Roe vs Wade, Roe Vs Wade, Supreme Court
The post Judicial Overreach Again appeared first on The Moderate Voice.
