ACLU warns Supreme Court that lower court abortion pill decisions relied on "patently unreliable witnesses"

Washington — The American Civil Liberties Union is warning the Supreme Court that lower court decisions in a closely watched battle over a widely used abortion pill relied on "patently unreliable witnesses" and "ideologically tainted junk science."

In a friend-of-the-court brief the ACLU filed with the Center for Reproductive Rights and The Lawyering Project, the groups argued the lower courts that have ruled in the case involving the drug mifepristone supplanted the Food and Drug Administration's scientific judgment with unproven assertions from anti-abortion rights medical associations and doctors about the alleged harms of medication abortion.

They indicated that the judges' acceptance of those claims is an outlier and pointed out that other courts hearing cases related to abortion have engaged with those same witnesses and research and "routinely discredited [the anti-abortion rights doctors'] evidence for lack of scientific integrity."