Newsweek promoted dangerous, mail-order abortion drugs this week, presenting them as a solution for women if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
The news outlet focused on how pro-abortion groups have been working to expand access to the deadly drugs, saying they “might be the sole alternative for women” living in states where abortion is banned.
Unborn babies could be protected from abortion in more than half the country soon if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe this summer. Late Thursday, Politico reported about a leaked alleged draft opinion from the court that overturns the 1973 ruling and returns the abortion issue to the states.
Without Roe, researchers predict as many as 26 states would ban abortions, saving hundreds of thousands of unborn babies’ lives.
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However, abortion activists are working to thwart these life-saving efforts, and one of the ways is through mail-order abortion drugs. Last year, the Biden administration got rid of a safety regulation that required a medical professional to meet with the pregnant mother in person before prescribing abortion drugs. Now, abortion businesses are selling the drugs online without seeing or even talking to the person.
Newsweek reports more:
The pills are available online for around $150, with financial aid also accessible, according to shoutyourabortion.com, [which encourages women to brag about their abortions and ignores women who regret or were forced into aborting their unborn babies.]
The group argues that what it calls “abortion-by-mail” can provide a much-needed option for women living in the 26 states that are likely or certain to ban abortion in the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
New mail-order abortion groups are popping up in the U.S., while other groups are sending abortion drugs from Europe and other locations.
According to the report, the European group AidAccess said requests from Texas women for abortion drugs more than doubled after the state passed its heartbeat law, which bans abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable, about six weeks of pregnancy.
A few months later, Texas lawmakers also passed legislation to ban mail-order abortion drugs, and other states are doing the same. Newsweek reports 32 states require licensed doctors to provide abortion drugs, and 19 prohibit telemedicine, or webcam, and mail-order abortions.
Pro-abortion groups claim to be helping women by aborting their unborn babies, but abortion drugs are dangerous for both mother and child, especially if taken without medical supervision.
The drug mifepristone is 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. Until last year, 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.
In the United States, the FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 26 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.
A 2021 study in the journal “Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology” 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. 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.
The abortion drugs now are used for more than half of all abortions in the United States, the Guttmacher Institute reported in February. In 2020, the drug was responsible for 54 percent of all unborn babies’ abortion deaths, up from 39 percent in 2017, the pro-abortion research group found.
