VP Harris says wrong name for FDA in interview about mifepristone

Vice President Kamala Harris butchered the name for the FDA in an interview about abortion rights that aired Friday.

Harris mistakenly said the Federal Drug Administration approved the abortion pill mifepristone more than two decades ago — but such an agency doesn’t exist. The Food and Drug Administration is the correct title for the administration also referred to as the FDA, which signed off on the abortion drug.

The veep was speaking with Noticias Telemundo’s Vanessa Hauc about the current state of abortion in the country when she made the error.

She brought up the ongoing court battle over the FDA’s decision to approve mifepristone — which is often used with a second drug to end pregnancies without the need for surgery — in 2000.

“On the mifepristone issue, it’s politicians finding a court, targeting a specific court that they thought would be helpful to them, to take a medication off the market, which was approved 20 years ago by the Federal Drug Administration,” Harris said.

She argued that what happened with mifepristone could happen to any other FDA-approved drug that Americans rely on.

Roughly half of people who get legal abortions in the US have medication abortions through the ingestion of drugs, but earlier this month a US district judge in Texas imposed a nationwide ban on mifepristone.

Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was once an anti-abortion activist, sided with pro-life groups who claimed the FDA’s approval some 23 years ago was wrong to approve the drug.

On Friday, the Supreme Court blocked the lower court decisions to ban or limit use of the pill while its use is decided through the court process.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments next month and the case is expected to return to the Supreme Court for the final say in the future.

Mifepristone blocks production of the pregnancy hormone progesterone and is most often taken alongside misoprostol which causes contractions and forces a miscarriage. Together, the drugs have a 99% success rate and are considered as safe as surgical abortions.