HuffPost: How The Far Right Engineered An Assault On Abortion Access, Even In Blue States
Issues
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on March 23, 2024.
The opinion rested in part on studies questioning the safety of mifepristone. They’ve since been retracted for shoddy science and for failing to disclose the researchers’ ties to anti-abortion groups.
As Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, senior fellow with the progressive group Alliance for Justice, put it: “The Fifth Circuit is the most receptive circuit if you’re a far-right idealogue who doesn’t care a whole lot about facts.”
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Buckwalter-Poza noted that the Alliance Defending Freedom’s size — it’s “comprised of thousands of lawyers” — allows it to simply “throw humans at the problem.”
The Supreme Court will have its say on mifepristone. New rules recently adopted by the Judicial Conference, though, could help bar similar cases from going forward in the future. Earlier this month, the oversight body for the federal judiciary took steps to crack down on “judge-shopping,” requiring certain cases to be randomly assigned to one of many judges in a district.
“It cannot be overstated how important it is that the Judicial Conference as an entity has said judge-shopping is a problem,” Buckwalter-Poza said. “But the actual substance of their response is not quite as effective as we would hope for, if there were really going to be an effort to put an end to judge-shopping.”