Matthew Kacsmaryk, an ultra-conservative federal judge practicing in the Northern District of Texas, is a man you can count on. Otherwise, how to explain that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicin, a grouping of several Christian groups hostile to abortion, personally sent him a letter from Tennessee, more than 1,500 kilometers from Amarillo, the city where he sits ? In this letter, she asks him to ban the abortion pill in the United States, on the pretext that the main component of this drug – mifepristone – would endanger the lives of women.
This idea is false, the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, having authorized its marketing more than twenty years ago, after having scientifically proven its effectiveness and safety. But the truth doesn’t matter, the main thing being that Matthew Kacsmaryk is in charge of the case, as if his ideology had the power to override the facts. On this point, Republican Senator Susan Collins had also, when the judge was appointed in 2019, warned of her “inability to apply the law impartially”.
The future of the abortion pill in the United States is therefore in the hands of an anti-abortion activist who, more generally, stands out by taking radical decisions in all areas that are close to his heart. At 46, his CV is already full: in August 2021, he reinstated the policy of “staying in Mexico”, which prohibits Mexican asylum seekers from crossing the border until the study of their file has been completed. not been carried out. In the area of individual freedoms, in October 2022 he declared illegal the directives of the Biden administration aimed at protecting transgender people from the discrimination they may face in the workplace. Finally, on birth control, a decision by Kacsmaryk must have pleased the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicin, since it required all young people under the age of 18 in Texas to ask their parent or guardian for permission to obtain a method of contraception.
A decision applied nationwide
While the United States has 94 administrative courts, it is not surprising to learn that this judge is particularly sought after by traditionalist circles. Professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas Law, Stephen Vladeck explains, in the columns of the Guardian, all the interest of an anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ entity in addressing this Texas judge: “In the event of an appeal, which is almost systematic given the controversial nature of the cases, Texas raises of the Federal Court of Appeals for the 5th District, where 16 judges sit, 12 of whom are appointed by the Republicans. Human embodiment of what Donald Trump’s orphan electorate would like to find again, Kacsmaryk also attracts antivax conspirators, who seized him in order to condemn media groups such as the BBC or Associated Press for not having shared information on the supposed dangerousness of vaccines.
If all eyes are currently on him, it is because his decisions have a national scope. Unlike the Dobbs decision, which, since June 2022, returns legal control of voluntary pregnancy terminations to state legislatures, the judge’s decision on the future of the abortion pill will apply to the whole of the United States. . While this method of abortion is used by half of the women who have recourse to abortion, its ban would upset the lives of several million of them.