A Pennsylvania ban on taxpayer-funded abortions means new Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro cannot stockpile abortion pills as other pro-abortion governors are doing.
Pro-abortion activists are panic-buying after a federal judge blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone as an elective abortion drug last week. Doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which filed the lawsuit, said the FDA “repeatedly put politics above women’s health” when it approved and later expanded use of the abortion drug.
Anticipating the ruling, Democrat governors in Washington state, California, New York, Maryland and Massachusetts purchased or plan to purchase huge supplies of abortion drugs with their taxpayers’ money in case the drug is permanently banned.
Polls consistently show most Americans do not want their tax dollars to be spent on elective abortions and, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, the law protects their interests.
Speaking with 6 ABC, Gov. Shapiro said the law prevents him from following the trend of other Democrat governors.
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“My state law here in Pennsylvania prohibits me from paying for mifepristone with state dollars, so we’re not able to stockpile [abortion drugs] as my fellow governors have done,” Shapiro said.
However, he also promised to fight to keep abortions legal and accessible in Pennsylvania. Currently, elective abortions are allowed for any reason up to 24 weeks.
In 2021, 33,206 unborn babies were aborted, about half of them using the abortion drug, according to state department of health data.
Right now, the Planned Parenthood abortion chain is pressuring Shapiro to cut off funding in the state budget for a vital pregnancy and parenting assistance program that has helped hundreds of thousands of mothers and babies in need.
And instead of investing in support to help families in need, many other Democrat governors are dumping money into the abortion industry through grants, abortion drug purchases and more.
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 abortion risks are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with about one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
On Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially lifted the federal judge’s block on the abortion drug in response to an appeal from the Biden administration. However, the court also banned mail-order abortions that put women’s lives at risk, condemned the FDA for skirting the approval process and restored strict limits on the drug meant to protect women’s health that the Biden administration removed.
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.
In recent years, abortion drugs have been used for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies annually, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
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.
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.
