DOJ CLEARS USPS TO DELIVER ABORTION DRUGS — The Justice Department has cleared the U.S. Postal Service to deliver abortion drugs to states that have strict limits on terminating a pregnancy, POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein and Alice Miranda Ollstein report. A legal opinion, from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, concludes that a nearly 150-year-old statute aimed at fighting “vice” through the mail isn’t enforceable against mailings of abortion drugs as long as the sender doesn’t know that the drugs will be used illegally. Backstory: A week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, the Postal Service asked the Justice Department for legal guidance on how to respond to growing efforts to circumvent state abortion restrictions by sending the drugs to people seeking them in those states. FDA UPDATES NEW RULE ON ABORTION PILL — On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration updated a rule allowing brick-and-mortar pharmacies to dispense the medication abortion pill mifepristone, Alice and Lauren Gardner report. What’s in the rule: The policy will allow chain and independent pharmacies to stock and dispense the drug to patients with a prescription. It’s unclear, however, how many pharmacies will agree to do so, considering it requires a special certification process. Pharmacies in more than a dozen states that have near-total bans on abortion won’t be able to participate. Why it matters: The abortion pill recently became the most common method of terminating a pregnancy in the United States. What’s next: The Biden administration already took a major step to open up access to the pill in 2021, making permanent pandemic-era rules allowing people to access it within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy via telemedicine and mail delivery. But the FDA’s move opens a new legal and regulatory front in the ongoing battle over the procedure following the fall of Roe v. Wade and is likely to draw lawsuits from anti-abortion groups and state officials. PARENTS SLAM FDA ON FORMULA INACTION — Dozens of parents across the country are convinced that the infant formula crisis was more extensive than industry leaders and federal health officials have determined, Helena Bottemiller Evich writes for POLITICO. Their babies suffered illnesses they suspect were caused by contaminated formula, but their cases aren’t included in the government’s official count, leaving them feeling as if their children’s illnesses have been dismissed by federal officials. They’re alarmed by what they see as a lack of urgency by the FDA to address weaknesses in the oversight of formula manufacturing plants. No single official is clearly in charge of food at the FDA, and the agency suffers from serious organizational and cultural problems that make it painfully slow to get just about anything done, as a POLITICO investigation found earlier this year. The findings were confirmed this month in an external review of the FDA’s foods program conducted by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the FDA.
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