Forbes touted a new study from the University of British Columbia this week to claim that the abortion drug mifepristone is so safe that the FDA should drop its safety regulations.
The report failed to take into account that the purpose of the drug is to kill an unborn baby, the opposite of safe. It did not mention other studies that found the abortion drug is not safe for women either.
Mifepristone is an abortion drug used up to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone and basically starving the unborn baby to death. Typically, women also are prescribed a second drug, misoprostol, that induces labor and expels their aborted baby’s body.
For many years, the FDA has required licensed medical professionals to provide mifepristone in-person after a medical exam – safety regulations that protect women from undetected and potentially life-threatening complications.
However, last year in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, the governments used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to stop enforcing these safety regulations. Immediately, abortion businesses began selling the drug through the mail without the woman ever seeing a doctor in person.
Now, the Biden administration is considering making the change permanent – and, according to Forbes, the new University of British Columbia study suggests that the change “poses no additional risks to women.”
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Here’s more from the report:
… beginning in November of 2017, Canada made mifepristone available as a normal prescription drug, dropping the REMS-like restrictions it had put in place in 2012. According to a new University of British Columbia-led study published in the December 8, 2021 New England Journal of Medicine, from that November 2017 date through March 15, 2020, the number of abortions in Canada did not increase. However, the percentage of abortions performed with pharmaceuticals rather than surgery did. It jumped from 2.2% to 31.4%. Even with that percentage change, the number of abortion-related complications did not surge.
Data such as those gathered by the UBC researchers suggests that, should surgical abortions become illegal in some American states, medication abortions prescribed in a telemedicine visit and delivered by mail might safely meet the needs of women wanting to terminate early pregnancies.
Forbes cited a few other studies suggesting the abortion drug is safe for women, too. However, it failed to mention any conflicting data, and there is a lot.
In the United States, the FDA has linked the abortion drugs to at least 24 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications – and those are with the safety regulations in place. Also notable, under the Obama administration, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported to the government. So the numbers very well could be considerably higher.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, new government health data shows a massive hospitalization rate due to abortion drugs after the government began allowing mail-order abortion drugs in 2020. According to the data, more than 10,000 women who received the abortion drugs by mail needed hospital treatment in 2020, or about one in 17 women.
A 2009 study “Immediate Complications After Medical Compared With Surgical Termination of Pregnancy,” in “Obstetrics and Gynecology” found a complication rate of approximately 20 percent for the abortion drugs compared to 5.6 percent for surgical abortions. Hemorrhages and incomplete abortions were among the most common complications.
Another study, published in “Issues in Law & Medicine” in January, found “glaring deficiencies” in reports documenting complications from the abortion drug in the U.S. The most common complications included a failed abortion, an incomplete abortion (meaning part of the unborn baby or placenta remained in the womb), infection and a missed ectopic pregnancy, according to the research.
Abortion drugs are not safe for mothers or their unborn babies, and they should be illegal. At the very least, however, while abortion remains legal in the U.S., safety regulations should be in place to protect mothers’ lives from profit-driven abortion businesses that are preying on vulnerable women and their unborn babies.
