Federal judge: West Virginia can restrict abortion pill sales
Federal judge: West Virginia can restrict abortion pill sales
apnews.com
Federal judge: West Virginia can restrict abortion pill sales
West Virginia can restrict the sale of the abortion pill, despite federal regulators’ approval of it as a safe and effective medication, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Chambers determined Thursday that the near-total abortion ban signed by Republican Gov. Jim Justice in September 2022 takes precedence over approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Totally ridiculous ruling. Do we have to teach these federal judges about the commerce clause? About how the federal government regulates interstate commerce because otherwise we'd have fifty different sets of laws about what medicines can be used, basically making the practice of medicine and the sale and development of drugs impossible? But I guess that would presume conservative judges care about the constitution in the first place. They start at ban all abortion right now no matter what and write whatever crap they need to justify it.
The commerce clause does not stop states from restricting the use and sale of medicines within that state. For example, different states have passed various laws restricting the use of opioids.
There's a legal standard they would have to follow to avoid commerce clause problems called "undue interference." IANAL so cannot define it directly for you, but it'd be hard to argue outright banning isn't undue interference. Whereas regulations may be permissable in some cases like you mentioned with opiates. But you won't see a state that has a law outright banning sale of an opiate that's approved for use by the fda for this reason.
Has the FDA ever tried to challenge those though?
It's not nearly as straight forward as you think it is.
Yeah, I still hope sanity prevails here before we have "heart failure guidelines: fifty protocols for each fifty states based on what fda approved medications they have decided to allow."
Thank you for the article. I also found this write-up helpful as well: https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/10/1/lsad005/7078178?login=false
That's a dormant commerce clause case; creating a whole ass agency like the FDA is about as un-dormant as Congress can be and should make this a whole different thing
The problem is you still think they care.