Conventional wisdom says if you want to bury bad or controversial news, the best time to release it is Friday afternoon, when most people’s minds are on their weekend plans and not current events. This truism holds up even in our age of nonstop social media and a 24/7 news cycle.
Extreme anti-abortion advocate and federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee based in Amarillo, Texas, might have factored this into the timing of his decision to put a hold on government approval of the safe and widely used abortion drug mifepristone.
Kacsmaryk’s decision was designed to immediately block access to mifepristone across the US. Thankfully, a federal district judge in the state of Washington, Thomas O. Rice, ruled shortly after Kascmaryk in favour of 17 state attorneys general who sued to keep mifepristone legal.
