Leading pro-life doctors are warning that Joe Biden’s plan to expand at-home abortions in response to Roe v. Wade being overturned will endanger women’s lives.
The Washington Times reports doctors with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) said abortion drugs are dangerous for mothers as well as their unborn babies especially when taken without medical supervision, which the Biden administration now allows.
“This is dangerous,” said Dr. Christina Francis, an Indiana OB-GYN and CEO-elect of the medical association. “This at-home use of these medications is dangerous for many reasons. We need to protect our women patients from this push for DIY medication abortions.”
Biden, a pro-abortion Democrat, and his administration have been touting access to abortion drugs, also referred to as medication or chemical abortions, through the mail and telemedicine as a solution to the overturning of Roe. On June 24, the high court ruled that states may protect unborn babies from abortion again. About a dozen already have done so and more are expected to in the weeks ahead.
Responding to the ruling, Biden promised to make sure the abortion drug mifepristone remains available to women to “fullest extent possible.”
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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland also mentioned the abortion drug in his response to the Supreme Court decision, telling states that they “may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”
Mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. It blocks the hormone progesterone and basically starves the baby to death. For decades, the FDA required that abortionists provide the drug in-person after a medical examination because of its high risks.
In December, however, the Biden administration got rid of the in-person requirement and began allowing the drug to be sold through the mail. Now, women – or their abusers – can buy the abortion drug online without ever seeing or even talking to a doctor.
Many doctors and researchers have been warning about the dangers of the abortion drug for years, and the Biden administration’s December action raised further alarm.
An in-person medical examination to screen for an ectopic pregnancy and to determine the gestational age of the unborn baby is vitally important for the mother’s health, said Dr. Donna Harrison, current CEO of AAPLOG, according to the Washington Times.
Harrison said ectopic pregnancies are life-threatening and they occur in approximately one in 50 pregnancies.
“By not having an ultrasound, by allowing home [abortion] use, you have 1 out of 50 women who are at risk of dying because the symptoms of a rupturing ectopic pregnancy are exactly the same symptoms as a Mifeprex abortion: pain and bleeding,” she said. Mifeprex is a brand name for mifepristone.
Harrison said some women have bled to death because of an undetected ectopic pregnancy that ruptured after taking abortion drugs.
Several recent studies have found that the risks of the abortion drug are much more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment. A recent 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.
“That figure was before the FDA relaxed its rules, and with all of these restrictions in place, with women having to see a physician in person,” Francis said, according to the report. “So we know that these complications are only going to increase when you remove the physician from that process. So we need to call for better health care for our patients. Women deserve better than what they’re receiving from the abortion industry. They deserve accurate information.”
Abortion drugs are big business. Mifepristone now is used for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. 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.
The FDA has linked the abortion drug 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.
LifeNews recently published an article highlighting eight facts that every woman should know about the abortion drug.
