A federal judge in Texas overturned the two-decade-old approval of a safe and effective abortion pill on Friday, the latest volley in a conservative battle against reproductive rights in the United States.

If it stands, the ruling by a Donald Trump appointee would reverse permission granted by the Food and Drug Administration for a drug widely used to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

But, in an illustration of how deep the fracture on abortion runs in US society, a judge in Washington state moments later ruled in a separate case that access to the drug must be preserved in more than a dozen states.

The dueling legal opinions, as well as an immediate vow by the US Department of Justice to appeal the Texas ruling, means the issue is almost certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

The conservative-dominated panel last year overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that had enshrined a woman’s right to abortion for half a century.

Reaction to the Texas ruling was swift.

“My administration will fight this ruling,” President Joe Biden said.

“The court… has substituted its judgment for FDA, the expert agency that approves drugs. If this ruling were to stand, then there will be virtually no prescription, approved by the FDA, that would be safe from these kinds of political, ideological attacks.”

The president of the powerful American Medical Association, Jack Resneck, said that allowing judges to interfere in “extensive, evidence-based, scientific review of … well-established FDA processes is reckless and dangerous.”

Planned Parenthood, one of the largest pro-abortion groups in the United States, said the ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a former conservative activist aligned with the religious right — was an assault on science.

“We should all be enraged that one judge can unilaterally reject medical evidence and overrule the FDA’s approval of a medication that has been safely and effectively used for more than two decades,” said the group’s president Alexis McGill Johnson.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said his department would appeal the judgment.

“The Justice Department strongly disagrees with the decision… and will be appealing the court’s decision and seeking a stay pending appeal,” he said.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling came after a coalition of anti-abortion groups sued to freeze the national distribution of mifepristone.

While he stayed the FDA’s 23-year-old approval, he also halted “applicability of this opinion and order for seven days” to allow time for appeals.

Anti-abortion groups hailed the move.

“Today’s decision out of Texas is a win for the health and safety of women and girls,” said Katie Glenn of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America.

“The ruling reaffirms that pregnancy is not an illness and abortion is not health care. Finally the FDA is being held accountable for its egregious violation of its own rules.”

– ‘Judge-shopping’ –

The case landed in his court via what critics call “judge-shopping,” in which plaintiffs take legal action in a district where the judge has a history of rulings that support their case.

Federal judges in the United States have a right to issue rulings that carry national legal force.

Opinion polls show a majority of Americans favor access to abortion.

But the issue is an explosive one for those on the right, especially evangelical Christians.

A number of Republican-dominated states have begun trying to restrict access to abortion, and have launched legal attempts to overturn what many believed was settled law.

The Supreme Court ruling last year was seen as a major victory for the movement.

But it has proved unpopular with the electorate.

Some observers said the Republican failure to capture the Senate in last year’s midterm elections, along with their lackluster showing in the House, was at least partially the result of their support for the issue.

More than half of all abortions in the United States are performed with medication.

Mifepristone is one component of a two-drug regimen that can be used in the United States through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

It has a long safety record, and the FDA estimates 5.6 million Americans have used it to terminate pregnancies since it was approved.

The Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Balkh province, known for fighting against Islamic State jihadists, was killed in a suicide attack at his office on Thursday, officials said.

The killing, a day after he met top government officials visiting from Kabul, makes Mohammad Dawood Muzammil one of the highest-ranking figures slain since the Taliban stormed back to power in 2021.

Violence across Afghanistan has dramatically dropped since the Taliban seized control, but the security situation has again deteriorated with IS claiming several deadly attacks.

“Two people, including Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh, have been killed in an explosion this morning,” local police spokesman Asif Waziri told AFP, adding that the blast happened on the second floor of his office, in the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif.

“It was a suicide attack. We don’t have information as to how the suicide bomber reached the office of the governor,” he said, adding that two people were also wounded.

Authorities deployed extra security at the governorate, who forbade journalists from taking photos, an AFP correspondent reported from near the site of the blast.

Muzammil was “martyred in an explosion by the enemies of Islam”, tweeted government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

Muzammil was initially appointed governor of the eastern province of Nangarhar, where he led the fight against IS jihadists, before being moved to Balkh last year.

On Wednesday, he met two deputy prime ministers and other senior officials visiting Balkh to review a major irrigation project in northern Afghanistan, according to a government statement.

IS has emerged as the biggest security challenge to the Taliban government since last year, carrying out attacks against Afghan civilians as well as foreigners and foreign interests.

Several attacks have rocked Balkh, including in Mazar-i-Sharif last year, some claimed by IS.

In January, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 people when he blew himself up near the foreign ministry in Kabul, in an attack claimed by IS.

The Taliban and IS share an austere Sunni Islamist ideology, but the latter are fighting to establish a global “caliphate” instead of the Taliban’s more inward-looking goal of ruling an independent Afghanistan.

At least five Chinese nationals were wounded in December when gunmen stormed a hotel popular with businesspeople in Kabul.

That raid was claimed by IS, as was an attack on Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul in December that Islamabad denounced as an “assassination attempt” against its ambassador.

Two Russian embassy staff members were killed in a suicide bombing outside their mission in September in another attack claimed by IS.

Turkish rescuers on Saturday pulled three people, including a child, alive from the rubble 13 days after a massive quake claimed tens of thousands of lives, but one later died, a Turkey media platform reported.

The channel did not provide any further details.

A journalist for Turkish television channel NTV later reported that one of those found had died after being taken to hospital.

NTV broadcast images of rescuers placing the rescued people onto stretchers after they had spent 296 hours trapped in the rubble.

A 7.8-magnitude tremor on February 6 rocked southeastern Turkey and Syria, killing more than 43,000 people and leaving millions without proper shelter.

Teams have been finding survivors all week despite them being stuck for so long under the rubble in freezing weather, but their numbers have dropped to just a handful in the past few days.

Turkish rescuers on Friday pulled a 45-year-old man from rubble, several hours after others discovered three people including a 14-year-old boy alive under debris.