Joe Biden’s administration issued a temporary halt to health and safety regulations on abortion drugs Monday, allowing abortion facilities to sell the dangerous drugs through the mail without ever seeing the woman in person.
Pro-life leaders warned that the change will put women’s lives at risk as well as their unborn babies and increase the risk of coercion and abuse.
The pro-abortion blog Jezebel reports the Biden administration’s action applies to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone for the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To protect women, the FDA requires mifepristone to be provided in-person by a medical professional after the woman has a check-up. The drug, one of two taken together to abort unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, has been linked to two dozen women’s deaths and thousands of serious complications.
But the abortion industry wants all safety regulations gone. It claims the drug is safe and effective, and it wants to begin selling it through the mail after just a brief online consultation. Biden’s order will allow abortion groups to do that.
Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, condemned Biden in comments to LifeNews.com.
“With this action, the Biden administration has made it clear that it will prioritize abortion over women’s safety. Allowing unsupervised chemical abortions via telemedicine, without requiring timely access to medical care, will put women in grave danger. Data released in 2018 by the FDA shows thousands of adverse events caused by abortion pills, including 768 hospitalizations and 24 deaths since 2000. Chemical abortions should have more medical oversight not less,” she said.
The abortion drug currently is used for about 39 percent of all abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute. With the safety regulations gone, that number likely will increase.
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Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock informed the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a letter Monday that her agency concluded that allowing patients to receive the pills via telemedicine and through the mail will not increase risks and will keep people safe from contracting the virus. …
Mifepristone “has very few risks at all,” said Jen Villavicencio, a health policy fellow with ACOG. “It is more safe than over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and Tylenol. We know this medication can be safely administered via telemedicine because we’ve studied it.”
But abortion advocacy groups have ignored the numerous problems with mail-order abortions, including how women seeking abortions online know, without seeing a doctor, how far along they are in their pregnancy. Abortion drugs do not work well after 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Nor do pro-abortion groups mention how abortion drugs can be deadly to the woman if she has an undetected ectopic pregnancy – something a doctor’s visit (no longer a requirement because of Biden’s action) would detect.
Abortion activists also are specifically marketing the drugs to African American and Latino women and women in rural areas, vulnerable groups who are less likely to have access to good medical care. This raises serious concerns about what will happen when women experience complications at home while aborting their unborn babies.
Then there is the problem of coercion and abuse. LifeNews has reported many, many stories of women and girls who were pressured or forced to abort their unborn babies. In one recent case, a Wisconsin man was accused of buying abortion drugs online and slipping them into his pregnant girlfriend’s drink after she refused to have an abortion.
Last spring, the British government took similar action when it temporarily allowed the abortion drugs to be mail-ordered during the pandemic. Soon afterward, numerous reports of health and safety problems surfaced – including at least two women’s deaths. In another case, authorities investigated how a woman who was 28-weeks pregnant received the abortion drugs in the mail and used them to abort her viable, late-term unborn baby.
In the United States, mifepristone has been linked to at least 24 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications. Risks include excessive bleeding, severe abdominal pain, infection and hemorrhage.
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.
Even pro-abortion President Barack Obama’s administration did not do away with the FDA regulations . His administration did loosen the regulations by allowing the drug to be prescribed later in pregnancy and allowing non-doctors to provide it, but it kept other regulations in place to protect women’s safety.
Meanwhile, pro-life leaders are working hard to pass protections for mothers and unborn babies. They have been urging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to protect lives by keeping the safety regulations in place. Many states also have been passing laws to increase safety requirements for the abortion drugs, including requiring an in-person check-up with a doctor before the drugs can be provided.
