Up First from NPR - Ruling on Abortion Medication, Recovery in Maui, Elections in Guatemala

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Mifepristone remains accessible, for now, after an appeals court ruling Wednesday. Recovery from Maui's wildfires continues. Elections in Guatemala have broad implications for corruption and crime.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Kevin Drew, Larry Kaplow, Ally Schweitzer, Diane Webber, and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Mansee Khurana, Claire Murashima, and Lilly Quiroz. Our technical director is Zac Coleman, with engineering support from Gluvna. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A new ruling sets up a legal showdown over abortion pills. A federal appeals court decision would restrict access to the common drug Mifepristone. What happens if the case makes it to the Supreme Court? I'm Leila Fondon, that's Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News. In Maui, residents say they're filling in the gaps left by a sluggish federal response to the deadly wildfires. It's difficult because these are our people we're trying to take care of. And rescue teams are still combing the area for human remains. Elections are set for this weekend in Guatemala.

A few years ago, the country was battling corruption, but that battle has stalled. Well, voters decide to pick up the fight again. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change,

this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. A federal appeals court issued a ruling on the abortion medication Mifepristone yesterday. The FDA approved Mifepristone 23 years ago, and today it's widely used. Medication abortions account for about half of all abortions in the U.S., and for now, Mifepristone is still available anyplace abortion is legal.

But Wednesday's ruling sets the stage for the Supreme Court to weigh in on that. NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin is covering this story, and she's with us now to tell us more. Good morning. Good morning, Michelle. So tell us what this ruling does broadly. So a panel of judges at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans decided that Mifepristone should still have FDA approval, but it should be much harder to access. So as a reminder, this case came out of Texas from several medical groups and doctors that oppose abortion. They challenged the Food and Drug Administration's approval of mifepristone and the changes it made later to how the medicine is prescribed. So on Wednesday,

this appeals court agreed with those challengers in part and said the FDA should never have made it easier to prescribe mifepristone. Nothing changes yet, though, because the Supreme Court ruled in April that access to mifepristone must remain the same, though, because the Supreme Court ruled in April that access to mifepristone must remain the same until it gets a chance to weigh in. So when could that happen? And what could change at that point? The Supreme Court could hear oral arguments in this case as soon as this fall. Its decision could be different than this appeals court ruling. But if it's the same, access to this drug would change dramatically. So under yesterday's ruling, access would essentially be rolled back to before 2016, when doctors needed to prescribe this medication in person and there were other restrictions.

Here's how Greer Donley put it. She is a health law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It would cause pretty significant changes to the status quo in terms of how pills are accessed in this country. Changes like no more telehealth appointments for Mifepristone and no access after those very first few weeks of pregnancy. And this would be nationwide. So the ruling would reach out into states that have been working to protect access to abortion and change things for patients and doctors in those states too. Was this ruling expected or is it a surprise? It was definitely not a surprise. This was a panel of three judges.

They were all appointed by Republican presidents. Two were appointed by former President Trump. In the hearing, they really hammered attorneys for the FTA and Danco, which is the pharmaceutical company behind Mifepristone. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the plaintiffs in this case, was thrilled by the ruling and called it a significant victory. The Department of Justice released a statement saying it strongly disagrees with the decision and will be seeking Supreme Court review. And of course, this is the same court, the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade last year. What is our expectation about how they're going to respond to this ruling? I mean, we will have to wait and see what happens, but many legal experts say this case has some weaknesses, we will have to wait and see what happens, but many legal experts

say this case has some weaknesses, especially when it comes to the plaintiff's argument that they have standing to sue. So Mary Ziegler is a law professor at UC Davis who's written books about the history of abortion. My impression is that this is the Fifth Circuit trying to resurrect what had been a pretty flawed case in the hope that this Supreme Court is conservative enough that there's no case too weak or extreme, really, for this court on abortion. I think many people will remember there was a separate federal case on Mifepristone, which was led by Democratic states. Where is that now? Yeah, so a federal judge in Washington state agreed with the challengers who said that FDA

was being too restrictive when it came to Mifepristone. And Ziegler says these conflicting lower court rulings makes it more likely the Supreme Court will take this up. So that's what will likely happen next. That's NPR's Selena Simmons. Selena, thank you. Thank you. Residents of West Maui are starting to head back to their homes or what is left of them as recovery from last week's wildfires continues. Disaster responders have loosened restrictions on parts of the island, but with the death toll still climbing and thousands of people now homeless, some residents are frustrated by what they perceive to be a slow recovery. NPR's

Gabriel Spitzer has been reporting from Lahaina, Hawaii, and he's with us now to tell us what he's seeing. Gabriel, thanks so much for joining us. Sure thing, Michelle. Gabriel, just to start us off, what are you able to see? Well, they fully opened the main road into West Maui for the first time since the fire struck more than a week ago. The actual burn area is still off limits, but we were able to visit an aid hub in a beachside park just a few miles north of central Lahaina. And many people there still had really basic needs, things like pet food and underwear. And honestly, there's no real end in sight for now as this is likely to be a really long recovery effort. Well, just from what we've all been able to see,

the destruction was just enormous in Lahaina. Why do you think people say that the recovery is moving slowly? Well, there's a lot to be cautious about as they go through the burn area. For one thing, it's extraordinarily difficult to identify and even to find human remains. I talked with a forensic anthropologist, and she said it really takes a trained expert eye to spot, say, bone fragments in the rubble. And then there's a huge concern about toxics. This fire burns so many buildings and vehicles that it unleashed just a whole stew of hazardous chemicals. So search and rescue teams are moving extremely methodically. We've been hearing from local residents who say they're filling in the gaps that they feel have been left by their federal response.

Are you hearing that? Yeah, very much so. And this aid hub that we visited actually is a really good example. It's almost completely run by locals. And talking to folks there, you get a sense of the tension between these grassroots aid efforts and the government response. Jeff Gracia lives just across the street from the aid station, and he's been volunteering every day at the InfoTent. It makes me kind of frustrated that police telling us to start to move people towards the federally organized shelters just because we're more grassroots and not centralized,

which is what they want, which is a valid concern, but also it's difficult because these are our people we're trying to take care of. You know, speaking of that, just, I'm just trying to take care of. You know, speaking of that, I'm just trying to think about how this is all going to take place when so many people in the community are also victims themselves. Exactly. I mean, I talked to so many people who went through hell themselves and then just put their heads down to go help their neighbors. I met a guy named Adam Perry, who's a former wildland firefighter himself and who lives in Lahaina. He wound up sheltering with a few dozen other people in a concrete parking structure as the fire passed. His own house was leveled, but Adam says his firefighting training just kicked in.

I left the parking garage to go look for survivors and the fire almost ate me up a couple times. I had to dive underneath the fire, It went right over my back. It felt like more as if we were at war than at a fire. Concrete was exploding. Things were blowing up right in front of you. I've never seen anything like it in my career. You really get the sense, Michelle, that people are still getting their heads around this unprecedented fire.

One young man who lost his younger brother told me that it looked like paradise in hell. Oh, wow. Well, Gabriel, before we let you go, as we are speaking now, just a small fraction of the victims have been identified, and an even smaller percentage of them have been named so far.

Do you have any sense, or do people there have any sense of what people are going to expect to learn in the coming days? Well, people have been told again and again that those numbers are going to rise. The search and rescue teams have only combed through about 40% of the burn area so far. And so this is all still what officials call Phase Zero, which is the recovery of human remains. And the cleanup and eventually rebuilding seem a long way off still. That's NPR's Gabriel Spitzer from Lahaina in Maui. Gabriel, thank you so much.

You're welcome. Now we're going to look ahead at the presidential election set for this weekend in Guatemala. The first round in June was met with apathy, but it produced a surprise candidate and a real choice about where the country is headed. To step back a second, Guatemala had been a place of hope a few years ago. A brave movement backed by the U.S. and U.N. was fighting corruption and impunity. But the establishment fought back, closing corruption probes, sidelining judges, prosecutors, and even presidential hopefuls. NPR's Ada Peralta is with us now from Mexico City to talk about how this vote could determine which way Guatemala goes next. Eder, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Michelle. So the country is down to a runoff vote between two candidates for president. As briefly as you can, tell us about who they are and who's backing them. So the establishment is backing Sandra Torres from 2008 to 2012. She was the first lady of Guatemala, and she led her husband's social programs, which made her very popular. But in 2019, when Guatemala was on this voracious anti-corruption campaign, she was jailed. She was charged with misusing campaign funds. But once this anti-corruption task force was disbanded, the charges against her were dropped,

and she launched a presidential campaign. The surprise candidate is Bernardo Arevalo. And he also has a political bloodline. His father was the first democratically elected president in Guatemala in the mid 40s. And he's been an ambassador and deputy foreign minister, he ran an anti-corruption campaign, but his party didn't have much money. He was the one candidate you didn't see on billboards. So no one thought he could actually make it to a second round. But here he is, and his campaign has reinvigorated this whole election process. You know, Guatemala was once a focus of the U.S. and the U.N. trying to address crime there. What happened to that effort?

It's dead. There was a U.N.-backed task force that conducted hundreds of investigations, but they were kicked out of the country. Many judges and prosecutors have fled, or they've been bought off. And we've seen some of the effects of that during the presidential campaign. The candidate who was leading in the polls during the first round was an outsider. He presented himself as an anti-corruption crusader, but he was disqualified five weeks before the first round of this election. It was a move that was condemned as anti-democratic by the international community. And he said it was the corrupt of Guatemala trying to stop any effort to bring them to justice. But this campaign did change during the second round. Suddenly, corruption is the talk on the campaign. Even Sandra Torres,

who had kind of sidestepped the issue, is now clear. Jail the corrupt, she says. So you've been telling us about lots of problems with these elections. Given all that, what are the chances that this vote, however it turns out, will be disputed? Well, there's already a lot of uncertainty. The offices of Bernardo Revalo, the surprise candidate, have been raided, and the court actually ruled that he should be disqualified from the race. Electoral authorities said that they didn't know if that decision was legal, so the elections and the campaigns have continued. But also polls show that Guatemalans have little confidence in their electoral authority. So the table is set for either side to contest the results, and the table is set for a legal battle.

And the elections are this Sunday. And when are we going to have preliminary results? Overnight, we should get them. All right. That's NPR's Eder Peralta in Mexico. Eder, thank you. Thank you, Michelle. And that's Up First for Thursday, August 17th. I'm Michelle Martin. And I'm Leila Falded. Up First is produced by Mansi Karana and Claire Marashima. Our editors are Kevin Drew, Larry Kaplow, Ali Schweitzer, Alice Wolfley, and Diane Weber. Our director is Lily Kitos.

Our technical director is Zach Coleman with engineering help from Hannah Glovna. Join us again tomorrow. And if you're ready for more NPR news, there's a radio show for that. Find NPR's Morning Edition on your NPR station at stations.npr.org. For podcasts, local news, and the latest headlines, take NPR Everywhere with the NPR One app, and you can find that in your app store.