In overturning Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, with what now looks like deliberate naivete, that it was returning the question of abortion rights to the voters of individual states. Less than a year later, the anti-choice movement has confirmed that its true goal is to deny abortion rights throughout America, regardless of the wishes of states' voters. That's the only way to read last week's ruling by a Texas court seeking to effectively outlaw the medication-abortion drug mifepristone. The ruling could put the most common method of early-term abortion out of reach to women throughout America.

In his opinion in last year's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe, Justice Samuel Alito waxed about returning the abortion issue "to the people and their elected representatives," thus allowing "each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish."

But no one elected Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Texas-based federal judge whose ruling last week seeks to invalidate the Food and Drug Administration's approval more than two decades ago of mifepristone, one of a two-drug regimen for the most commonly used method of abortion.

Kacsmaryk, a long-time, vocal opponent of abortion rights, was legal counsel for a Christian conservative organization when then-President Donald Trump appointed him to the bench in 2019.

Kacsmaryk has since been the go-to jurist for venue shopping by right-wing plaintiffs. Indeed, the lead plaintiff in the current case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, incorporated in Texas and established a registered agent in Amarillo — where Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge — a few months before filing its lawsuit there. Why that organization would even have standing to sue is just one of the twists Kacsmaryk navigates on his way to what was clearly his original objective of outlawing the drug.

Kacsmaryk's written ruling is steeped in the language of anti-choice activism. He refers to fetuses as "unborn human" or "unborn child" throughout. In straining to refute years of data proving the drug is safe, he cites fringe studies by anti-choice activists. Among his justifications for overruling FDA approval of the drug is that "women who have aborted a child ... often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the abortion." His problem with the abortion drug, in other words, is that it does, in fact, facilitate abortions.

Even as Kacsmaryk ordered the drug pulled from the market, a federal court in Washington state reached the opposite conclusion. If, as expected, the issue reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be interesting to see if Alito still prioritizes the importance of letting voters decide abortion issues state by state.

In any case, Kacsmaryk's ruling should stand as a warning to America's pro-choice majority: The forced-birth movement doesn't view the overturn of Roe as the end of its crusade. It's just the beginning.

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