I am not a doctor ...

French physician and biochemist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, in 2008. Baulieu developed RU 486, the first safe, effective abortion pill. Photographer: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images/AFP

As said so many times, you can't fix stupid, a characteristic in full display for all to see when a Texas judge, without medical training, made a blanket judgment call on a safe drug adversely impacting the lives of millions of women living in the land of the brave and home of the free. But it's even worse than that as his ruling opens the floodgates to dubious challenges to other drugs by judges having issues when deciding upon cases based on questionable findings like the one made in Texas when Kacsmaryk issued an unqualified decision resembling, in indirect fashion, to how the inquisition operated in enhancing the powers of the church under the rubric of god.

Legal scholars say Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk could have rendered a decision that would have limited the impact to just mifepristone. That would have been a terrible blow to abortion access, but it would have left alone the question of FDA’s authority, and limited the potential impact on other medications. Instead, he rendered a 67-page opinion that cherry picks evidence regarding the safety of the drug — ignoring dozens of studies and over two decades of its safe use around the world — in order to overturn the approval, says I. Glen Cohen, faculty director at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics.

Think about that: a single judge without medical training decided his read on select data on a drug was more sound than the FDA’s vast expertise. That should make the drug industry — not to mention their patients — very nervous.

The breadth of the ruling and the judge’s clear willingness to second guess the FDA’s own expertise could breed similar lawsuits in jurisdictions with similarly sympathetic judges. “It really could become a roadmap for people seeking to challenge the approval of a wide range of other drugs, vaccines and healthcare products,” says Rachel Sachs, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in FDA and health law.

 The war on women continues unabated.