California Senate Bill Forces Universities to Distribute Abortion Pills

State   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Feb 21, 2023   |   1:41PM   |   Sacramento, California

California college health centers were turned into abortion facilities this January when a new pro-abortion law went into effect.

Now, all public colleges and universities in the state must provide abortion pills for free on campus – putting women at greater risk of injury, death and abuse, said Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins.

This is “a reckless act endangering young mothers along with the preborn, which will destroy once great schools, turning them into taxpayer funded abortion vendors,” Hawkins said in a statement.

The law, a first for the nation, drew widespread criticism before the state legislature passed it and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law in 2019. Even previous Gov. Jerry Brown, pro-abortion Democrat, vetoed the bill in 2018, saying the abortion expansion was “not necessary” because abortions already are so easily accessible.

The University of California and the California State University systems also expressed concerns, but the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed the bill anyway, giving schools until January of this year to comply. Now, colleges and universities must provide abortion pills to students up to 10 weeks of pregnancy for free on campus.

Pro-life advocates have been preparing for the abortion expansion. Hawkins said Students for Life has been working across California to educate students about the dangers of abortion drugs as well as the free pregnancy and parenting support available through pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life charities.

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Hawkins said Students for Life created an emergency response toolkit for its 100 pro-life groups across the state, and plans to conduct a campus tour about the “dangers and horrors” of the abortion pill. The organization also will connect women who suffer injuries and healthcare workers whose rights have been violated to attorneys willing to help them.

At the national level, the pro-life organization wants to see Congress pass legislation, the Protecting Life on College Campuses Act, to ban federal funding to colleges and universities that provide abortions to students and employees.

Thousands of unborn babies could be aborted on campus each year as a result of the new mandate. According to a state Senate Health Committee April 1, 2019 analysis, “… up to 500 public university students currently must leave campus each month to access medication abortion.”

The abortion pill mifepristone works by blocking the hormone progesterone and basically starving the unborn baby to death. Typically, abortionists also prescribe a second drug, misoprostol, to induce labor and expel the baby’s body.

The FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 28 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.

Right now, a federal judge is considering a lawsuit from four medical groups that challenges the FDA approval of mifepristone as an abortion drug. The medical organizations accused the agency of ignoring evidence of safety problems and failing to properly study the risks.

Studies indicate the risks are 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.

Another new study from the University of Toronto, “Short-Term Adverse Outcomes After Mifepristone–Misoprostol Versus Procedural Induced Abortion,” published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that one in ten women who took the abortion pill had to go to the emergency room, according to Pregnancy Help News.

Often, women suffer emotional and psychological trauma, too. Recently, OB-GYNs have reported hearing from more distraught women who realized too late after taking the abortion pills that their aborted baby was not just a “clump of cells.”

Dr. Donna Harrison of the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs told Aleteia about women calling their doctors and asking what to do with their aborted babies’ bodies.

Many panic after passing their aborted baby at home and seeing its “legs, arms, head, toes. It’s not a blob of tissue. And women are not prepared for that,” Harrison said. “These women are being told to flush human tissue down into the septic system? Even from a public health standpoint it’s a terrible idea.”

Others have expressed concerns about a rise in forced and coerced abortions as well.