Biden’s FDA has warned against the growing trend of providing abortion pills to women who are not pregnant — leaving anti-Life activists furious.
The national abortion conversation continues at the forefront and it shows no signs of cooling down. Although Pro-Life states like Texas are protecting preborn children, the federal government has done almost everything in its power to make abortion more accessible. This has included the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year changing its standards governing abortion-inducing drugs, permitting abortion pills to be prescribed via telehealth, taken entirely at home and without medical supervision.
However, Biden’s own FDA is now acknowledging the risk of the most recent abortion phenomenon — “advanced provision” of abortion-inducing drugs to women who are not pregnant. The FDA has said definitively that, “Mifepristone is not approved for advance provision of a medical abortion.”
In order to get around Pro-Life laws and to secure abortion-on-demand, abortion activists have been handing out abortion pills like candy. They want women who find themselves facing an unintended pregnancy to be able to reach in their medicine cabinet and take pills they already have on hand to cause an abortion immediately. Sometimes the pills are prescribed by doctors, and sometimes abortion activists purchase them in large quantities from less restrictive countries and bring them into the United States to distribute.
In its recent statement, the FDA says it is “concerned that providers who gave medication for an abortion before they were pregnant wouldn’t be able to properly oversee their patient’s care.” Abortion pills only effectively cause an abortion if the pregnancy is 10 weeks along or earlier. They also do not “work” if the baby is implanted anywhere outside the uterus. If used in cases of an ectopic pregnancy or beyond 10 weeks of pregnancy, the drugs pose an increasing risk of complication to the women ingesting them.
Abortion activists who once largely belonged to the “trust the experts” crowd are now criticizing the FDA. According to them, abortion pills are extremely safe, even safer than Tylenol, and women know themselves and their bodies better than any doctor ever will.
Of course, abortion pills are not safe at all. They have around a 50% death rate, since a preborn child dies almost every time they are taken.
The “safer than Tylenol” claim comes from the idea that adverse events are more common with Tylenol than with abortion pills. But this claim should not be believed.
First, something that might be considered an adverse event with Tylenol, such as heavy bleeding or cramping, would be expected with abortion pills and would not be reported as an adverse event.
It is also important to note that most of the adverse events that result from Tylenol use come from the improper use of the drug, such as overdoses or conflicting interactions with other drugs. Tylenol is available over-the-counter, and its dosage is not usually prescribed by a physician. Correct use is in the hands of the individual taking the medication. Adverse events that happen due to abortion pill use, on the other hand, are almost always results of proper use of those pills. Until recently, abortion pills and their use have been very strictly monitored expressly for the purpose of minimizing user error.
Mifepristone, one of the drugs used in the abortion pills regimen, is not intended to be used by women with ectopic pregnancies. It says this directly on the label. However, a woman has no way of knowing whether her child has implanted ectopically without seeing a doctor. If more women start taking these pills outside of their narrowly defined “safe” use, we will see even more extremely disastrous consequences for these women. And it will not be uncommon, either. Around 1 in 100 pregnancies are ectopic, and every ectopic pregnancy requires medical treatment to prevent life-threatening complications.
The abortion activists who call this move by the FDA “political” are actually the ones who do not care about the safety of women. Anti-Life activists want to overlook safety for the sake of their own political agenda, even when the experts tell them otherwise. Today’s abortion activists have gone fully off the rails, and it is promising that we are seeing the federal government recognize this to some extent.