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15th April 2023 10:42 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicaug
(Post 14047013)
From https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-texas-mifepristone-ruling-flies-face-science:
Quote:
AMA: Texas mifepristone ruling flies in the face of science
Bookmark
APR 7, 2023
The following statement is attributable to:
Jack Resneck Jr., MD
President, American Medical Association
“Today’s court decision from a federal district court in Texas staying longstanding approval of mifepristone flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug that has been used by millions of people for more than 20 years. The court’s disregard for well-established scientific facts in favor of speculative allegations and ideological assertions will cause harm to our patients and undermines the health of the nation. By rejecting medical facts, the court has intruded into the exam room and has intervened in decisions that belong to patients and physicians. The court’s rebuff of scientific facts also undermines informed decisions, erodes trust in institutions, exacerbates social divides, and places individual and collective health at risk.
“Additionally, this decision introduces the extraordinary, unprecedented danger of courts upending longstanding drug regulatory decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Doing so goes against the established scientific process that leads to those decisions and puts other drugs at risk of being subject to similar efforts. Substituting the opinions of individual judges and courts in place of extensive, evidence-based, scientific review of efficacy and safety through well-established FDA processes is reckless and dangerous. We’ve also witnessed efforts by state legislatures to limit access to this medication–we believe that FDA regulations should supersede state law to avoid a patchwork of state-level, non-evidence-based restrictions that interfere with the appropriate use of a safe and effective drug and frustrate access to medically necessary care.
“Mifepristone has been studied extensively for over two decades and has been proven to be safe time and time again. In addition to its use for voluntary termination of pregnancy, mifepristone is regularly used, in combination with misoprostol, as one of the most effective regimens for medication management of miscarriage–a use this decision ends for countless patients already struggling with the loss of a pregnancy. Prohibiting access to mifepristone would force patients to consider using a higher dosage of misoprostol on its own, which is a less effective treatment.
“There is no evidence that people are harmed by having access to this safe and effective medication. To the contrary, there is substantial evidence that the denial of needed abortion care without justification carries a psychological, physical, and economic toll. For people who do not have access to procedural abortion or adequate medical facilities, there may be no other options to obtain critically needed care. Current data show an association between restricted access to safe and legal abortion and higher rates of maternal morbidity and mortality, with already vulnerable populations experiencing the greatest burden. Reduced access to mifepristone will almost certainly exacerbate the maternal mortality crisis in places that do not have access to this medication.
“We will continue to support access to evidence-based health care, including abortion medication, and oppose intrusions that undermine our patients’ health.”
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And from https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...yk-law-review/, this is perfectly normal (emphasis mine):
Quote:
As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions.
The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”
But a few months after the piece arrived, an editor at the law journal who had been working with Kacsmaryk received an unusual email: Citing “reasons I may discuss at a later date,” Kacsmaryk, who had originally been listed as the article’s sole author, said he would be removing his name and replacing it with those of two colleagues at his legal group, First Liberty Institute, according to emails and early drafts obtained by The Washington Post.
What Kacsmaryk did not say in the email was that he had already been interviewed for a judgeship by his state’s two senators and was awaiting an interview at the White House.
As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”
The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings in which Kacsmaryk’s past statements on LGBT issues became a point of contention.
Now, six years later, as Kacsmaryk sits as a judge in Amarillo, Tex., his strong ideological views have grabbed the country’s attention after his ruling this month that sought to block government approval of a key drug used in more than half of all abortions in the country — an opinion that invoked antiabortion-movement rhetoric and which some medical experts have said relied on debunked claims that exaggerate potential harms of the drug.
Kacsmaryk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for First Liberty, Hiram Sasser, said that Kacsmaryk’s name had been a “placeholder” on the article and that Kacsmaryk had not provided a “substantive contribution.” Aaron Reitz, who was the journal’s editor in chief at the time and is now a deputy to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), said Kacsmaryk had been “our chief point of contact during much of the editing” and “was the placeholder until final authors were named by First Liberty.”
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I am definitely aware of how in academia, authorship can get weird (including adding authors to papers who might have minimal or null contributions), but this seems kind of... stinky?
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