Murkowski rips abortion pill ruling: ‘I’m quite concerned about it’
Ryan King
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) criticized a Texas judge’s decision to halt the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for a pill widely used to induce abortion.
The Alaska senator previously voted to confirm U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to his post but appeared to have second thoughts in the wake of his decision issued earlier this month, which she said she found concerning.
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“After 20 years of FDA approval that he would be questioning a woman’s ability again to have a say over her reproductive health, I’m quite concerned about it,” Murkowski told HuffPost.
Kacsmaryk ordered the suspension of approval for mifepristone after contending that the FDA improperly expedited the process to “greenlight elective chemical abortions on a wide scale.” Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen alongside misoprostol to cause abortion.
Late last week, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito stayed the decision, teeing up an expected high court review of the case this week. Medical abortion accounts for roughly half of the abortions nationally, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights advocacy group. A ruling out of Washington also contradicted Kacsmaryk’s order.
“When I had an opportunity to look at his record and vetted him, he demonstrated to me he had the credentials as a judge,” Murkowski added while emphasizing she also voted for the Washington judge.
When pressed about if she would still support Kacsmaryk, Murkowski indicated she “probably” wouldn’t.
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Following Kacsmaryk’s ruling, reports surfaced that he removed his name from a 2017 Texas Review of Law and Politics article and did not flag it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The article bashed the Obama administration’s policies on abortion and other issues.
Murkowski has long described herself as pro-abortion and favored the precedents set in Roe v. Wade. No stranger to bucking her party, she famously voted against voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations.