Abortion pill manufacturer sues over West Virginia ban
Abortion pill manufacturer GenBioPro is suing West Virginia over its sweeping ban on the procedure, saying the state law is unconstitutional.
Abortion pill manufacturer GenBioPro filed a lawsuit Wednesday arguing that West Virginia's sweeping ban on the procedure is unconstitutional — one of a spate of suits testing the legality of medication abortion in the post-Roe legal landscape.
GenBioPro manufactures mifepristone, the first pill in a two-drug regimen used to carry out medication abortion. Medication abortion has become a hot-button issue since the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion.
Medication abortion now accounts for more than half of all abortions carried out in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. The Biden administration has sought to shore up access to abortion pills, even as more than a dozen states have banned the procedure.
The drugmaker, which filed its case in West Virginia federal court, argues that the Food and Drug Administration's regulations on abortion medication override state law. Also on Wednesday, a medical doctor in North Carolina sued officials over the state’s stringent requirements for the use of mifepristone. In November, anti-abortion medical providers filed the “anti-abortion mirror” of the two suits, legal expert Rachel Rebouché said; that lawsuit argues the FDA acted outside of its authority in approving medication abortion in 2000. The outcomes of the cases could determine who can access medication abortion amid the patchwork of abortion laws that have sprung up across the country since the high court’s decision.
“Think about one federal court in Texas saying mifepristone shouldn’t be on the market, one federal court in North Carolina saying the FDA preempts state law,” Rebouché, dean of Temple University's law school, said in an interview with NBC News. “There’s bound to be confusion.”
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