Pro-life leaders slammed the Biden administration this week for showing favoritism to the abortion industry and “reckless” disregard for mothers’ and babies’ lives after it got rid of safety regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone.
Late Thursday, Biden officials at the Food and Drug Administration rolled back vital safeguards on mifepristone, also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex, which is used to abort unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Although abortion activists say abortion is between a woman and her doctor, the Biden administration removed any requirement for a woman to see a doctor before getting the abortion drug. Now, the abortion industry may sell deadly abortion drugs through the mail without ever seeing the woman in person.
Nicole Hudgens, of the Family Policy Alliance, said it’s the billion-dollar abortion industry that benefits from the new rollback, not women.
“The Biden administration cares more about padding the wallets of their friends at Planned Parenthood than they do about the safety and health of women,” Hudgens said. “Despite the fact that abortion-inducing drugs are four times more fatal than surgical abortions, we continue to see the administration’s push for their expansion … with little to no safeguards.”
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The abortion drug is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn babies. The FDA also has linked mifepristone to at least 24 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications. Notably, however, under President Barack Obama, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported to the government. So the numbers very likely are higher.
A study published in “Issues in Law & Medicine” in January found that “significant morbidity and mortality have occurred” after women take the abortion drug, and a check-up and ultrasound are important to rule out any potentially life-threatening complications, such as an ectopic pregnancy. The study also found that complications from the abortion drug are significantly under-reported to the FDA.
Speaking with Fox News, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, called the Biden administration “reckless” and “insane” in its disregard for women’s and children’s safety.
“This is a reckless decision that the FDA has said that came down,” Hawkins said. “This is not a decision that was made for women or a women’s best interests at all.”
She continued: “It is an insane decision for the FDA to say a woman who wants to obtain abortion never has to even go towards a physician to confirm that she’s pregnant or to confirm the age of her child, or to confirm the location of pregnancy, to ensure that a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy is not occurring.”
Risks of mifepristone and misoprostol, the most common abortion drugs taken together to abort and then expel an unborn baby from the womb, include excessive bleeding, severe abdominal pain, infection, hemorrhage and death. The drugs are especially dangerous for mothers with undetected ectopic pregnancies.
Slamming the changes as “political,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said more women and children will suffer as a result of the Biden administration’s actions.
“The FDA has lowered the standards for women’s health in name of greater access to abortion, a truly political move that will have grave consequences,” Mancini said. “Today’s decision will lead to more lives lost to abortion, and will increase the number of mothers who suffer physical and psychological harm from chemical abortions.”
Hawkins told Fox News that the change appears to be pro-abortion leaders’ “panicking” reaction to the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again.
“… to put women’s lives at risk just to further their cause and to think that they’re doing some sort of end run around Roe vs. Wade, it’s a completely reckless and insane decision,” she said.
Some states already have taken action to protect mothers and babies. Ohio, Oklahoma, Montana, Indiana, Arkansas, Arizona and Texas have state-level safeguards against mail-order abortion drugs, and pro-life leaders predict at least seven additional states will enact similar protections in 2022.
Mifepristone is an abortion drug used 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.
In April, however, the Biden administration used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to stop enforcing these safety regulations. Then on Thursday, it did away with them altogether.
Pro-life leaders also expressed concerned that the change will lead to more coercion and abuse. LifeNews has documented numerous stories of women who were forced or coerced into aborting their unborn babies or abused because they refused to do so, and studies show high rates of coercion and abuse among women who have abortions. In one recent case, a Wisconsin man was accused of buying abortion drugs online and slipping them into his pregnant girlfriend’s drink after she refused to have an abortion.
