OBGYN Debunks the Lie That the Abortion Pill is Safer Than Tylenol

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Apr 27, 2023   |   9:53AM   |   Washington, DC

A prominent OB-GYN from Texas debunked the claim that abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol during a U.S. Senate committee hearing Wednesday.

Dr. Ingrid Skop, a practicing OB-GYN and vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said women deserve to know the truth about the risks of mifepristone, an abortion drug used to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Abortion activists claim mifepristone is one of the safest drugs on the market, comparing it to Tylenol, penicillin and other widely-used medications. But Skop told the Senate Judiciary Committee that they are using false comparisons and under-counted complication numbers to make the claim.

The first problem is that abortion activists do not compare complications from the regular usage of Tylenol to the abortion drug, sometimes referred to as a chemical abortion, Skop said.

Instead, “they’re comparing Tylenol overdose deaths to the under-counted deaths from chemical abortion,” she told lawmakers, according to a video from the hearing shared by Live Action. “There’s no comparison. Women assume they mean normal Tylenol use. They don’t realize they’re comparing it to deaths from overdoses.”

The second problem is that complications from the abortion pill are under-counted – something Skop said she and other physicians know from personal experience. As a practicing OB-GYN for more than 30 years, she said she has treated many women suffering complications from the abortion pill, but their cases do not get counted because the abortion industry only reports complications they see.

“The abortion industry tells us about the complications they know about. But my experience has been, because the women have been assured it’s so safe, when they have a complication, they do not return to the abortion provider,” Skop continued. “They come to me as their gynecologist or they come to the emergency room in distress.”

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She pointed to studies that have found approximately one in 20, or 5 to 6 percent, of women go to the emergency room within a month after taking the abortion drug. And approximately 5 percent of women require surgery to complete the abortion “because their bodies cannot evacuate all the dead tissue,” she continued.

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 about one in ten women who took the abortion pill had to go to the emergency room, according to Pregnancy Help News.

Similarly, 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.

Doctors are still seeing women suffer abortion pill complications even in states where unborn babies are protected, Skop told lawmakers. Because the Biden administration recently began allowing mail-order abortions and the abortion industry has made abortion pills so easily available, women still are obtaining them in Texas and other pro-life states.

“I am still caring for these complications in Texas even though we have had abortion limitations for quite some time, because these drugs are circulating in the state to try to circumvent our state laws and provide abortions to these unfortunate women,” Skop said.

Millions of unborn babies have been killed with the abortion drug mifepristone, or RU-486, since its approval under the Clinton administration in 2000. Currently, it is used for almost half of all abortions in the U.S., killing approximately 400,000 unborn babies every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

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.

Right now, federal courts are considering a case filed by doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, challenging the FDA’s approval and later expansion of mifepristone as an abortion drug under Democrat presidential administrations.

The doctors said the FDA failed to properly study the safety of mifepristone and ignored federal law when it began allowing the drug to be sold through the mail without direct medical oversight. As emergency room physicians and OB-GYNs, the doctors said they have witnessed “the enormous pressure and stress caused by emergency treatment from chemical abortion [abortion drugs] gone wrong.”