Abortion Pills, Part I: Pregnancy is not a disease and Mifepristone is not the cure

In three months, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to announce a landmark ruling on the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone in the case U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The drug, also known as RU-486, is the first step in a two-drug procedure that blocks the supply of progesterone to the uterus, cutting off blood and nutrients to the preborn infant and slowly starving them to death over a one to two day period. Hours later, the second drug misoprostol is taken to induce labor-like symptoms that will expel the infant from the womb.

In 2000, despite numerous safety concerns and a failure to conduct proper clinical trials, the FDA approved the abortion pill mifepristone with the following requirements:

Pregnancies must be less than 50 days gestation (7 weeks)
Three in-person office visits required
Supervision by a qualified physician
All adverse events must be reported

In 2016, the FDA began deregulating the dangerous drug – not because it became safer, but because increased access would greatly profit the abortion industry. Now, the pills can be taken up to the 10th week of pregnancy (even though complications vastly increase as the pregnancy progresses), only one office visit was required, non-doctors can prescribe the pills, and only fatalities need to be reported.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the FDA again decreased regulations in 2021, allowing the drugs to be prescribed by non-doctors over video call and sent to the pregnant woman in the mail. Why is this dangerous? Read below:

“The FDA has turned chemical abortion into self-managed abortion, which is dangerous for women. Under the FDA’s anemic safety standards, women are expected to accurately diagnose the gestational age of unexpected pregnancies with woefully inadequate tools, self-administer abortion-inducing drugs, dispose of fetal remains themselves, and go to the emergency room when foreseeable and fully preventable serious medical complications occur. The removal of doctors from the chemical abortion process, the increasing span of gestational age for prescription, and the removal of key adverse event reporting requirements only serve two objectives – maximum abortion access and pharmaceutical profit – at the expense of women’s health,” an amicus curiae brief from several state policy councils reads. (emphasis added)

In order for a drug to be approved by the FDA, the company submitting the drug for approval must demonstrate that “a drug’s health benefits outweigh its known risks.” There are no health benefits to abortion. None. The only way the FDA could feasibly approve mifepristone was by treating pregnancy as if it were a life-threatening illness, despite the billions of women who have successfully given birth throughout history. An “illness” is not responsible for the existence of the human race.

“The FDA approved these drugs under ‘Subpart H’ because the FDA determined that pregnancy is a ‘serious or life-threatening illness’ and that these chemical abortion-inducing drugs provided ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments,’ namely surgical abortion,” the brief reads. (emphasis added)

The irony is that the FDA approved the abortion pills because it somehow determined pregnancy was unsafe for women, but it turns out, chemical abortions are even more dangerous and deadly, not to mention the PTSD many women develop after seeing and sometimes holding their dead child in their hands and then having to flush them down the toilet. So much for “therapeutic benefit.”

One in 100 women require hospitalization due to heavy bleeding caused by misoprostol. Between 2000 and 2018, 24 women died from taking the abortion pills, 97 had ectopic pregnancies, 4,195 experienced adverse events, 1,042 were hospitalized, 599 required blood transfusions from heavy bleeding, and 418 developed infections. These pills not only end the lives of babies, they endanger the women who take them.

“Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit—they end a baby’s life and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake said. “The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs.” (emphasis added)

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