Defending the access to abortion medication, the US District Judge Thomas Owen Rice of the Eastern District of Washington ordered the federal government to keep the drug available in 17 states plus the District of Columbia.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas first decided that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000, which is one of the drugs used to end a pregnancy, needs to be stopped. (Photo: Getty Images)
Two Courts’ Contradicting Rulings in the Access to Abortion Medication – The US Supreme Court Intervene
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, first decided that the 2000 approval of mifepristone by Food and Drug Administration, one of the drugs used to end a pregnancy, where access to abortion medication is needed to be stopped. But less than an hour after Kacsmaryk’s decision, US District Judge of the Eastern District of Washington, Thomas Owen Rice, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, told the federal government to keep the availability of the drug in District of Columbia and in 17 states, supporting the access to abortion medication.
Obama chose Rice to be the judge for the Eastern District of Washington in 2011. In 2012, the US Senate gave him the job with a vote of 93 to 4. Since 1987, he had been an assistant US attorney in the state of Washington. In that job, he worked on problems related to taking land without permission and making claims for Social Security. Before that, Rice was a trial lawyer in the US Department of Justice‘s tax section, where he specialized in cases involving abusive tax shelters.
Rice used to support a group that fought for the right to abortion. In 2018, he issued a permanent order that stopped the Trump administration from cutting off funding for a Planned Parenthood program that paid for programs all over the country to help keep teens from getting pregnant, supporting the access to abortion medication. Planned Parenthood sued the Trump administration because it cut off grants for 81 groups across the US that worked to the access to abortion medication to stop teen pregnancy before they were supposed to. The administration did this because it said the grants had not worked.
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Cases with a Lot of Media Attention
Rice wrote that the Court decides that (Planned Parenthood) is in the public interest because it would stop harm to the community and stop the loss of information about how well teen pregnancy prevention is working, defending the access to abortion medication. When people in Yakima, Washington, sued the city because “at-large” seats on the City Council made it hard for Latinos to elect people who would serve their mostly Latino community, Rice said that the election system broke the Voting Rights Act.
In the 2014 Montes v. City of Yakima ruling, Rice said that the existing record, which is not disputed in any important way, supports only one reasonable conclusion and that given all the facts, City Council elections are said to be not ‘equally open to participation’ by the Latino voters. He also said that the numbered post system puts Latino voters at a huge mathematical disadvantage, even when their voting strength is at its best, because it requires a majority vote to win.
In the past few weeks, Rice has been in charge of cases involving a federal gun crime, assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon, and getting Covid-19 relief money through fraud. During his confirmation meeting, Rice’s answers to questions from lawmakers showed how he would think as a judge and how he would look at the decisions of higher courts.
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