Female leaders are “sounding the alarm” about the Biden administration’s decision to severely weaken longstanding FDA safety regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone.
In a piece at The Hill, U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, a pharmacist and Tennessee Republican, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, warned women that abortion activists are downplaying the life-threatening risks of the drug for their own profit.
“Shamefully, the abortion industry cares more about upping their abortion quota and making a profit than the safety and well-being of vulnerable women and girls,” they wrote. “They downplay the risks … but they are far from the safe, easy, and near-painless solution to pregnancy that the industry would have women believe.”
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.
Since the drug’s approval in 2000, dozens of mothers have died along with their unborn babies after taking the abortion drug and thousands more have suffered serious complications. Risks include severe pain, heavy bleeding, infections, ruptured ectopic pregnancies and death.
Despite the risks, the Biden administration got rid of vital safety regulations on mifepristone earlier this month. Now, abortion businesses may sell the drugs through the mail without ever seeing the woman in person.
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Harshbarger and Dannenfelser said more women and girls will suffer as a result of the Biden administration’s actions.
“We refuse to ignore the facts and let women’s health and safety become a political casualty, as thousands of women and girls undergo dangerous abortions alone in bathrooms and dorm rooms with no one to intervene,” they wrote.
Pro-life leaders are taking action to protect women and their unborn babies from the dangerous abortion drugs. Harshbarger and Dannenfelser said seven states passed laws this year to protect mothers and unborn babies from mifepristone, and they predicted that at least eight more will do the same in 2022.
Efforts also are underway to spread the word about the life-saving abortion pill reversal procedure, which can counteract mifepristone and save the baby’s life mid-abortion, they said. Studies show the treatment is safe for both mother and baby, and it has been credited with saving more than 2,500 babies’ lives so far.
However, pro-life advocates are up against a massive, well-funded abortion promotion campaign, backed by Democrat political leaders and many in the media. Major news outlets and women-focused media are running headlines promoting mail-order abortions as “safe” and abortionists are being heralded as experts in the matter despite their financial ties and biases.
This week, the Washington Post ran a column by Daniel Grossman, an abortionist, professor and researcher at the University of California San Francisco, who claims the abortion drug has been “proved safe.”
While Grossman praised the FDA for lifting most of the restrictions, he argued that the abortion drug is so safe that the FDA should have done away with all its safety regulations.
“Lifting the in-person dispensing requirement is an important first step to treat mifepristone more like other drugs, but the eventual goal remains complete removal of the REMS [regulations on drugs determined to have significant safety risks],” he wrote. “Until then, we’re letting abortion exceptionalism get in the way of evidence-based medicine.”
According to a National Right to Life Committee analysis, however, Grossman’s own research “does not comport with that rosy assessment.”
It pointed to a January 2015 study in “Obstetrics & Gynecology” co-authored by Grossman that found 6.8 percent of California’s Med-Cal patients (770 in the study) who had a drug-induced abortion in 2009 and 2010 visited the emergency room. In other words, “an abortion method he has long championed as ‘safe’ drove one of every 15 patients in his study group to visit the Emergency Room,” according to the analysis.
A growing body of research indicates that the abortion drug is dangerous, especially when taken without a doctor’s visit. In the United Kingdom, new government health data shows more than 10,000 women who received the abortion drugs by mail needed hospital treatment in 2020, or about one in 17 women. And a new study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that abortion-related emergency room visits by women taking the abortion drug increased more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015.
Harshbarger and Dannenfelser said women and children deserve better, and pro-life advocates are here to help families in need.
“While the Biden administration may refuse to protect women for the sake of abortion industry profit, we rise to the challenge of providing love, support, encouragement, and the truth they need to choose life,” they said.
