Last Saturday, April 15, the ruling of a Trump Appointee to the Northern District of Texas, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, went into effect, suspending the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s approval of the abortifacient mifepristone. Although this challenge was brought in a Texas Federal Court, it has the potential to affect every person in the United States Empire.
Mifepristone, one of the most common abortifacients in the country, and one accepted as safe and effective not only by the FDA but by a consensus of experts and doctors, was first approved for use over twenty years ago, in 2000. As right-fascist reaction against women’s and LGBT civil rights surges through the country, old political “gentlemen’s agreements” between the right and left wing of U.S. fascism, represented by the decaying Republican and Democratic parties, have begun to collapse. The long-standing agreement between the left and right wings of fascism concerning mifepristone is the latest victim of the growing disharmony within the U.S. ruling class and among its lackeys.
The pendulum of U.S. fascism has never been stable. Since this country’s founding, the balance between the more and less reactionary ruling classes has been achieved through civil wars, terror campaigns against the colonized peoples, periodic economic crises, and occasional concessions to the struggling masses. Ours is a reactionary period. Over the last few decades, the pendulum has been spinning increasingly off-balance. Since the rise of the neoliberal reaction (the so-called “third way”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the actual effect of the Democratic Party’s policies has been to act as a stabilizer, allowing the increasingly vicious agenda of the GOP and the right wing of reaction to progress in four- and eight-year strides, broken by four- and eight-year Democratic “reprieves.” One administration at a time, the GOP has been steadily chopping away at the progress made by the working classes and their allies over the course of the 20th century. The Trump presidency, rather than an aberration, was a normal continuation of this process, and the wave of Trumpite reaction that followed in his wake has thrown this teetering system into ever-greater disarray as the right becomes increasingly hostile to the old left-fascist consensus.
In the debate over abortion there are two major camps within the ruling class. On one side stand the left fascists, who are joined by ruling class interests like drug giant Pfizer. They currently hold tenuous control over the U.S. Empire’s government apparatus. On the other side are open social reactionaries, the most vicious of capitalism’s domestic faces, who have been planting ever-broader roots among the most violently reactionary segments of the population. The right-fascist crusade against women’s and LGBT civil rights is a positional war against rival factions of the U.S. ruling classes — the monopoly capitalists. This latest play over mifepristone is yet another step in the right-fascists’ Napoleonic conquest of this country’s halls of power — the courts, the legislatures, and the executives — from the state to the federal level. This vile strain of U.S. fascism will not stop until it has reshaped this settler-colonial empire in its own white supremacist image.
The mifepristone ruling itself and the legal doctrine behind it are little more than arcane legal trickery — a game for the capitalists’ competing teams of lawyers. Going back to the year 2000, before the 2008 crisis and the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist world-system that we see today, there was substantially more agreement between the political wings of the ruling-class duopoly. The initial approval of mifepristone was made by the FDA using a subsection of its regulatory powers, “Subpart H,” reserved for the speedy approval of drugs designed to treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses.” In other words, Subpart H was essentially designed for the rapid approval and deployment of drugs that had undergone extensive testing, were proven safe and accepted as such by an expert consensus, and were urgently needed to mitigate public health emergencies.
No one cared, in 2000, that the FDA used this particular subsection to approve mifepristone, as it’s done with thousands of other safe and effective medicines. Like every legal controversy that arises within the U.S. legal system, this didn’t matter until someone with capital and political influence decided to make it matter. Twenty-three years later, the breakdown of this tacit compact leaves the right of millions of people to access yet another means of safe abortion, yet another basic and essential reproductive medicine, at the mercy of one unelected judge in Texas.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling is not the last word in the matter. For one thing, it was a temporary order at an early stage in the litigation over this ludicrous technical detail in the FDA’s approval process. The final decision as to whether the FDA overstepped its bounds (and do we believe that’s the real issue the right fascists are complaining about? A minute detail about regulatory choices?) will only come at the end of lengthy and expensive litigation — terminating, in all likelihood, at the Supreme Court. Should the ominously-named Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine win its challenge, it would not only threaten the bodily autonomy of millions of people across the U.S. Empire, but would also condemn thousands, if not millions, to ineffective and dangerous “alternative medicine” treatments for unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and other gynecological problems.
Late last Wednesday night, the Federal Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (covering the Federal Districts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) struck down portions of Kacsmaryk’s punitive ruling. Tellingly, other portions were left standing. Although mifepristone will still be available, all expansions of the FDA’s approval — including its 2016 decision to allow non-M.D. mifepristone prescriptions and its 2021 ruling to permit mail-order prescriptions, both to ease barriers to access — were rolled back to foresee the outcome of the Texas legal battle. Last Friday, Justice Samuel Alito blocked the remainder of the ruling, preventing it from going into effect until 11:59 p.m. EST, Wednesday, April 19. This is to give the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine time to file their responses (which are due noon EST Tuesday) and for Kacsmaryk to read it before he issues yet more sweeping anti-mifepristone rulings.
This is exactly the kind of response from Democratic left fascists — our so-called “progressives” in government — that we should expect. Mifepristone will continue to be available — to bourgeois, ruling-class women. But this medicine, like so much healthcare in the U.S. Empire, will be denied to the toiling millions who cannot afford to visit the doctor, who have no insurance, who cannot go to the drug store where it is dispensed. To our capitalist rulers, these millions are merely pawns on a political chessboard.
Should we expect the Democrats to fight this latest ruling? Yes — but only because the enormous weight of the drug companies is behind them. But the fact is that the left wing of the ruling class has repeatedly exposed itself as feckless, aloof to the machinations of its right-wing rivals, and impotent. Yes, they will fight, but never to win. The tide of reaction is rising; we must prepare for its advent — not by voting for the Democrats, not by attempting to change the dictatorship of the capitalists for the better, but by building working-class power where we stand. There is no relief coming from the criminally useless left wing of Capital. If relief comes from anywhere, it will be from us, the working classes, the hundreds of millions whose labor keeps this country running, whose exploitation makes the capitalists rich, and from our organized class action.
