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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I can't seem to find a discussion on this yet, and I'm very curious to hear this site's interpretation of events. Yesterday, judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA should rescind it's approval for a commonly-used pill for abortions, mifepristone. The narrative I'm reading in mainstream media frames this decision as so cartoonishly insane that I'm struggling to see how it can be accurate. However, I'm also struggling to see where exactly the narrative is misleading.

First, the civics-101 explanation of how an agency like the FDA or the Fed should work is that certain regulatory problems are too technical and change too quickly based on new science for lawmakers to deal with them directly. Therefore, Congress delegates its power to a group of skilled experts who can react to the cutting edge of research and make reasonably policy. Of course, this is the civics-101 explanation and reality is presumably much more complicated, but the point is that laypeople who don't really understand the subject matter, like judges or members of Congress, should not be the ones making the final decision on technical questions.

Kacsmaryk's decision is framed as exactly this happening---the FDA made a complicated judgement about the safety of mifepristone based on their expertise and a non-expert judge decided to invalidate it based on their personal disagreements with the technical science. Articles emphasize quotes from the judgement where he explicitly disagrees with the FDA's interpretation of studies: "“Here, F.D.A. acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.", etc. Unfortunately, the actual decision (Edit: better link from ToaKraka) is very long with most of the pages being about legal details like establishing standing, making it hard to find the true reasoning behind it (though props to NYT for emphasizing the primary source so prominently, beat my expectations for news sources).

There has to be more going on here than a random judge deciding that they are more qualified to decide technical medical questions than actual experts; as a general rule, political opponents aren't ever this insane. What are the details I'm not understanding in the decision that make this more reasonable?

Pretty unfortunate timing of this top level post. The one just below it, shows the partisanship of allegedly purely fact-based federal agencies. So I would support more oversight and protection against human rights violations, in this case right to life, that are perpetrated under the guise of science.

You understand that if this drug is banned, women who suffer miscarriages have to carry the dead fetus and risk sepsis (whereas before they could take the pill to pass the tissue) correct?

  • -13

Definitely not the case. This is a chance for you to ask where you heard that, why they're lying to you, and what else you might have believed from them.

I’m no doctor, but a brief search online shows that doctors routinely prescribe mifepristone for miscarriages. Maybe there are alternatives that are just as good, but I presume doctors aren’t using their second choice.

You need to bring more evidence to this disagreement. As it is, this comment is bad.

What is the evidence that they are repeating a lie?

That is not true. The judge rescinded approval of the abortifacient part of the drug course, not the labor-inducing part.

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