The Abortion Pill is Not Safer Than Tylenol. It Has Killed Dozens of Women and Injured Thousands

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Feb 17, 2022   |   12:02PM   |   Washington, DC

Bloomberg ran a headline this week claiming that the abortion drug is “safer than Tylenol,” even though the facts prove otherwise.

Millions of unborn babies have been killed with the abortion drug mifepristone, or RU-486, since its approval under the Clinton administration. Today, it is used for about 39 percent of all abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The FDA has linked the abortion drug to at least 24 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications between 2000 and 2018. However, under President Barack Obama, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported. So the numbers almost certainly are much higher.

Now, the number of unborn babies killed with the drug is expected to grow even more after the Biden administration, last year, began allowing abortion businesses to sell it through the mail without ever even seeing the pregnant mother.

Since the change, abortion activists and leftist news outlets have been trying to convince the public that mifepristone — a drug used to kill a human being — is safe. But they only can do so by ignoring the unborn child and the growing body of studies that show high risks for the mother.

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Bloomberg began its piece:

Mifepristone may be the least marketed pharmaceutical product in the U.S. There aren’t any ads for it on TV. Most doctors can’t prescribe it. Pharmacists don’t know much about it, since it doesn’t sit on the shelves at CVS or Walgreens. It would be reasonable to assume this is all because mifepristone is exceptionally dangerous. But it sends fewer people to the ER than Tylenol or Viagra. It’s also highly effective when used as intended: to induce an abortion.

Though the percentage of abortions done with mifepristone has increased steadily since its approval, Bloomberg claimed the drug is not as widely used as it should be.

“… in the two decades since FDA approval, mifepristone has failed to reach liftoff,” the piece asserted. “If anything, it’s receded from view. A labyrinth of regulatory restrictions has kept it intentionally out of reach.”

Those regulations are safety measures to protect mothers because the drug has high risks, but the piece did not mention that. Instead, it portrayed the FDA requirements as “substantial and extraordinary restrictions,” writing:

Among the rules: Doctors had to date the pregnancy, which in many cases meant having the patient undergo an ultrasound. Patients had to acknowledge that a surgical abortion might still be required to fully end the pregnancy if the drugs didn’t work, and the prescriber had to confirm that option was available. The physician had to sign a statement saying the parties had read the instructions for how to take the medicine and knew how to follow them. Women had to take the pill at their provider’s office and then come back for a final checkup.

There are very good reasons for these common-sense safety regulations. For example, mifepristone does not work well after 10 weeks of pregnancy and, if a woman has an undetected ectopic pregnancy, it can be deadly to her and her unborn child. That is why, until last year, the FDA required an ultrasound.

Later in the piece, to back up its “safer than Tylenol” claim, Bloomberg pointed to a 2013 study that found “just 0.3% of patients who took the pill ended up hospitalized. The study’s authors concluded that abortion by pill is ‘highly effective and safe.’”

But it never mentioned that many other studies have found higher complication and hospitalization rates.

Recent British NHS 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.

Another recent study, published in December in the journal “Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” warned that the risks of the abortion drug likely are much higher than the United States government is reporting. The researchers found a “significant” gap in reports on abortion complications from mifepristone.

Another 2021 study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that the rate of abortion-related emergency room visits by women taking the abortion drug increased more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015. Researchers, looking at Medicaid code records, found “423,000 confirmed induced abortions and 121,283 subsequent ER visits occurring within 30 days of the procedure.”

And 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.

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.

Risks include excessive bleeding, severe abdominal pain, infection, hemorrhage and death. The drugs are especially dangerous for mothers with undetected ectopic pregnancies. For many years, the FDA 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.

Notably, the co-founder of the Bloomberg news outlet, Michael Bloomberg, donates millions of dollars to pro-abortion groups and once was accused of pressuring an employee to abort her unborn baby.