The Sketchy Career of an Anti-Abortion Doctor in the Mifepristone Case

[Nevilledog]

https://newrepublic.com/article/180196/tyler-johnson-abortion-mifepristone-supreme-court

No paywall link
https://archive.li/bEuIR

For Tyler Johnson, an emergency room physician from Grabil, Indiana, November 2022 was a pivotal month. Johnson is one of several named plaintiffs in a legal challenge, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, filed that November in an effort to severely restrict, and perhaps ultimately criminalize, the pill that’s used in the most common form of abortion in the United States. But Johnson, a self-described “Christian conservative” who had previously asked the state legislature to impose “criminal penalties” for abortion and supported “personal choice” against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, had more than the lawsuit to contend with. Johnson would spend the few months between the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June and the filing of the mifepristone challenge occupied with something else: his campaign for Indiana state Senate. Johnson was sworn in for his first term in the state legislature just four days after the mifepristone challenge was officially filed in a court in Amarillo, Texas. His crusade against health care he disapproved of was just getting started.

According to Johnson and others who brought the case the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this week, mifepristone is a dangerous “chemical abortion” drug that has transformed emergency rooms into post-abortion field hospitals; doctors, according to this narrative, have been drafted into serving patients who present with complications that can be indistinguishable from miscarriage. These patients who have complications after taking mifepristone “experience trauma” and may not “understand what the drugs will do to them,” according to Johnson in his sworn declaration in the legal challenge; they may also be lying about having taken mifepristone, he alleged, “unnecessarily presenting in the emergency department,” taking time away “from other patients who need it.”

Mifepristone, in reality, has long been known to be safe and rarely results in serious adverse reactions. But in the world that Johnson and the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine occupy, people who use mifepristone to self-manage abortion are at once vulnerable innocents and deceitful burdens, all of them abandoned to doctors who, against their conscience, must care for these purported casualties of medical abortion.

In order to argue that they have personal grounds—“standing”—for bringing this case, Johnson and the others doctor-plaintiffs claim mifepristone “harms” not only patients but also physicians. Some of the other named plaintiffs emphasized ethical objections, that they are “opposed to being forced to end the life of a human being in the womb for no medical reason, including by having to complete an incomplete elective chemical abortion.” For his part, Johnson argued that the Food and Drug Administration had “created a culture of chaos for emergency room physicians,” one that “puts us in increasingly high risk situations, which increases our exposure to claims of malpractice and liability.”

*snip*

Lying asshole