The opening segment of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" took down Texas judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, who recently tried to make it illegal for women all over the country to get a pharmaceutical pregnancy termination using Mifepristone, and for women having a miscarriage to get help without surgery.
Using "testimonials" from a website that the New York Times said used activists' language, Kacsmaryk overruled the Supreme Court's claim that laws governing women's medical decisions would be "left up to the states to decide."
Announcing the segment, Oliver called it "the thing Republican men love to ban as much as they love to secretly pay for."
As a CBS News report explained, Kacsmaryk claimed that the FDA improperly approved the drug 23 years ago. The problem with his claim is that the FDA actually researched the drug three times as long as they researched other drugs.
Oliver explained that it isn't just that Mifepristone "was studied for three times the average of what the FDA normally would, it's that it is demonstrably safer than many others on the market."
CNN used the same FDA data to show the number of deaths caused by Mifepristone compared to Penicillin and Viagra. Mifepristone is safer than both. There are four times as many deaths by Penicillin and Viagra is nearly ten times as likely to cause death. So, while many women have joked that Kacsmaryk's ruling would hand the country the ability to ban Viagra, the humor is actually a possibility. If the standard of all drugs approved by the FDA is to be better than Mifepristone, then suddenly, there will be many problems for schools with a strep throat outbreak.
"Look, it's not surprising that this judge arrived at a conclusion not supported by the evidence," said Oliver. "Not only does he have a face that screams high school football coach who follows all the cheerleaders on Instagram, but prior to being appointed to the court by [Donald] Trump, he was loudly anti-abortion and part of a right-wing legal organization."
The host went on to say that it wasn't a surprise that Kacsmaryk would try and ban abortion for the country, "but the way he got there was shockingly dishonest. At one point, his ruling cites a statistic that "77 percent of women who had a chemical abortion reported a 'negative change'" as a result.
"But the sample for that study was based on 98 blog posts on an anti-abortion website," Oliver explained. "Even the study itself pointed out how non-representative it was. It said, 'most women ... reported that their medication abortion changed them ... which is not surprising given the name of the website: Abortion Changes you.' And that is some heavy confirmation bias. And using that as your source is like saying abortion makes you better at frisbee golf by using a website called AbortionMakesYouBetterAtFrisbeeGolf.com."
"Also, one more point on 'Abortion Changes You,'" Oliver paused. "Not to be crass, you know what else does that? A f*cking pregnancy! Because I've got news for you, for weeks after giving birth, that baby is not the only one in diapers. Also, there's a baby now!"
He closed by bashing Kacsmaryk as "some Disney-channel vice principal who wanted to play doctor for the whole f---ing country."
See the full clip below or at the link here.
