Abortion activists once claimed that abortions need to be legal to protect women from dangerous back alley and self-induced abortions.
But it has become increasingly clear that abortion activists’ service is to the altar of abortion, not women’s safety or well-being.
In December, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called for the decriminalization of self-induced abortions in the United States, Reason reports.
The organization’s circular, nonsensical reasoning essentially is this: Women need easy access to self-induced abortions otherwise they could harm themselves by resorting to self-induced abortions.
In its new position statement, ACOG said it “opposes the prosecution of a pregnant woman for conduct alleged to have harmed her fetus, including the criminalization of self-induced abortion,” as well as “administrative policies that interfere with the legal and ethical requirement to protect private medical information by mandating obstetrician-gynecologists and other clinicians to report to law enforcement women they suspect have attempted self-induced abortion.”
Daniel Grossman, who wrote the position statement, even made the outrageous claim that pro-life lawmakers should make abortion more easily available if they want abortion rates to go down.
Here’s more from the report:
Far from protecting women from unsafe abortions, these policies “may result in negative health outcomes by deterring women from seeking needed care, including care related to complications after abortion,” ACOG warns.
The issue could be a big one in coming years. While self-induced abortion is certainly nothing new, the ability to self-induce an abortion safely and with relatively minimal pain is. “Medical abortion”—i.e., abortificient pills effective through at least the first trimester of pregnancy—makes that possible. And foreign internet pharmacies make clandestinely getting abortion pills easier than ever.
Combine this ease of access with rising U.S. medical costs, the disappearance of abortion clinics in many states, an immigration crackdown that leaves undocumented women afraid of too much exposure, and regulations prohibiting the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills and an increase in illegally-obtained pills and self-induced abortions is all but inevitable.
This new self-induced abortion push is extremely dangerous for women and unborn babies. The abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol have serious complication risks, especially for women who have not been examined by a physician.
In 2012, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration report indicated that 14 women in the United States alone died from using mifepristone and 2,207 women were injured by it. LifeNews reported several European women also died along with their unborn babies after taking the drugs, including women in Italy and Portugal. The number of women’s deaths is unknown, but a 2009 study found at least 29 women died.
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
A 2017 study about the abortion drugs found that “more than 9 percent reported symptoms and care-seeking for potentially serious complications, such as bleeding, fever, and persistent pain. Seven women needed a blood transfusion and 26 required antibiotics. The authors admit the rate of blood transfusions and antibiotic receipt were higher among women who performed medical abortions without medical supervision,” according to an analysis by Dr. Michael New, CLI associate scholar.
Abortion activists already are targeting rural women for self-induced abortions, claiming they do not have easy access to an abortion facility. But abortion activists fail to address the obvious problem with the scenario: If a rural woman experiences complications, she also may not have easy access to a hospital if something goes wrong.
Dangerous self-induced abortions are a new goal of the abortion industry. The University of California, Berkeley has a Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team, a nonprofit group that “envisions a world” where abortion drugs are as easy to buy as the morning-after pill, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Pro-abortion groups now have websites, brochures and hotlines dedicated to telling women how to abort their unborn babies at home.
They also are pressuring the FDA to expand the use of the dangerous abortion drug RU-486. In February 2017, the AP reported a group of pro-abortion doctors, professors and abortion advocacy groups urged the FDA to allow the abortion drug to be made available by prescription at pharmacies across the U.S.
The ACLU and Hawaiian abortion activists also are suing the federal government in a case that could force every pharmacy in America to sell dangerous abortion drugs.
And they have been touting a recent study in the journal “Contraception” that claims the abortion drug RU-486 is safe for at-home use.
The abortion drug mifepristone (RU-486) works by blocking the hormone progesterone, causing the uterine wall to break down and basically suffocating the unborn baby. A second abortion drug, misoprostol, typically is taken a day or two later to induce contractions to expel the dead baby’s body.
