More than 400 drug company executives showed support for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s authority, by signing a letter condemning a ruling by a Texas federal judge that invalidated the government agency’s approval of the abortion pill, mifepristone.

None of major pharmaceutical companies with leaders that signed the petition makes the drug, yet if the judge’s ruling proves valid, it can threaten the legitimacy of the country’s drug regulatory system, allowing politicians and federal judges, rather than health professionals, to dictate what medicines people can take in the United States.

The letter, entitled “In Support of FDA’s Authority to Regulate Medicines”, condemns the ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, of Amarillis, Texas, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump.  

The letter states that a “federal judge with no scientific training fundamentally undermined the bipartisan authority granted by Congress to the Food and Drug Administration” to regulate safe medicines.

Conflicting court orders from two U.S. federal judges have left the accessibility of abortion mifepristone unclear as the U.S. Department of Justice prepares its appeal. 

U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an Obama appointee from Washington state, issued a ruling opposite to Kacsmaryk’s, directing U.S. authorities not to make any changes that would restrict access to the drug in at least 17 states where Democrats have sued in an effort to protect its availability.

As U.S. partisan politics continue to impact health and medicine in the U.S., the legal challenges are expected to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.It is an unprecedented case of a judge issuing a decision on a drug “proven by decades of data to be safer than Tylenol, nearly all antibiotics, and insulin,” the letter states.

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