Two U.S. House Democrats introduced legislation Monday to make sure unborn babies continue to be killed in elective abortions after a federal judge issued a ruling Friday to block the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone.
The bill by U.S. Reps. Pat Ryan, D-New York, and Lizzie Fletcher, D-Texas, would codify into federal law the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone as an abortion drug in 2000 and a more recent expansion allowing the drug to be sold through the mail without direct medical supervision, according to NBC News.
Mifepristone is used for more than half of all elective abortions in the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
On Monday, Ryan slammed the federal judge’s ruling in a statement, claiming the decision to block the abortion drug was not based in science or medicine.
“The … decision has nothing to do with science or medicine and everything to do with radical groups whose only goal is a national abortion ban,” the congressman said. “My priority is protecting abortion access for women in New York and across the country.”
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His pro-abortion Protecting Reproductive Freedom Act also has the support of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
“We’re grateful to Reps. Ryan and Fletcher for standing with doctors, patients and everyday Americans defending our freedom to make our own decisions about our bodies,” NARAL president Mini Timmaraju said in a statement. “Together with our allies, supporters and Congressional champions, we will keep fighting until reproductive freedom for all is a reality.”
But a new poll by CRC Research found Americans oppose mail-order abortion drugs with little to no medical supervision (61 percent). Many (62 percent) do not feel confident about abortion activists’ claims that the drugs are safe either.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision Friday blocks the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the main abortion drug used to kill unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy. The judge agreed with Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine doctors that the FDA violated federal laws and ignored safety risks when it approved and later expanded use of the drug under the Biden administration.
“[O]ne thing is clear: the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or life threatening adverse reactions. Due to FDA’s lax reporting requirements, the exact number is not ascertainable,” the judge wrote.
The Biden administration already appealed the ruling, which is scheduled to go into effect later this week.
The facts presented by doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine indicate abortion drugs are not safe for mothers or unborn babies, and the FDA skirted the approval process by mis-classifying pregnancy as a life-threatening illness.
In his ruling, Kacsmaryk also ruled that the Biden administration violated the federal Comstock Act when it began allowing the abortion drug to be sold through the mail at the end of 2021. The law prohibits the mailing of any abortion “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing.”
First approved under the Clinton administration, mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy – although some abortionists use it later. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone and basically starving the unborn baby to death. Typically, abortion groups also prescribe a second drug, misoprostol, to induce labor and expel the baby’s body.
Studies indicate the risks of the abortion drug are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
Along with millions of unborn babies’ deaths, the FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 28 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications. 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 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.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the pro-abortion movement has been pushing abortion drugs even more heavily, and some groups send the drugs to women in pro-life states illegally.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been trying to expand the life-destroying drugs even further, first by allowing mifepristone to be sold through the mail without any direct medical supervision, and, more recently, by allowing pharmacies like Walgreens, CVS and RiteAid to sell them.
In California, public colleges and universities also now are required to provide abortion drugs for free on campus, and other Democrat-run states are considering similar mandates.
