The abortion industry plans to begin selling a ulcer drug off-label to abort unborn babies if federal courts block approval of the abortion drug mifepristone this spring.
A number of major news outlets have published articles about the plan, including The Atlantic, CBS News and Reuters, quoting pro-abortion researchers and activists who claim the ulcer drug, misoprostol, is safe to take on its own as an abortion drug.
Meanwhile, pro-life doctors’ warnings that numerous studies show the drug is not safe for mothers or unborn babies are being largely ignored.
“… evidence from around the globe demonstrates that misoprostol alone is a poor abortifacient and very likely to cause injury to women,” said Dr. Ingrid Skop, M.D., F.A.C.O.G., director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “These recommendations by abortion advocates in the media demonstrate conclusively that their goal is not the safety and well-being of women, but merely the death of as many unborn humans as possible through expansion of abortion by any means.”
Reuters published one such report this week that failed to mention these safety concerns. The article quoted Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, a pro-abortion researcher and professor at the University of California San Francisco, who asserted that the ulcer drug is safe – even while admitting the data shows it is not.
“If providers are forced to stop providing [the FDA-approved abortion drug] mifepristone, misoprostol alone is also safe and effective,” Upadhyay told the news outlet.
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Currently, the two drugs are prescribed together to abort first-trimester unborn babies in the U.S. First, the pregnant mother takes mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone and basically starves her unborn baby to death. A day or two later, she takes the second drug, misoprostol, to induce contractions and expel the baby’s body.
Notably, the FDA never approved misoprostol as an abortion drug; the federal agency approved it in 1988 to treat gastric ulcers.
However, abortion groups plan to use it anyway if the U.S. Supreme Court blocks the FDA’s approval of the first abortion drug. These include many mail-order abortion businesses as well as the nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood. Some pro-abortion Democrat governors also have used taxpayers’ money to buy stockpiles of the ulcer drug to be used for elective abortions if the court rules against the abortion pill.
Speaking with Reuters, Upadhyay admitted the ulcer drug taken on its own to produce an abortion is less effective than the two-drug abortion regimen, with as many as 13 percent of women requiring surgery to complete the abortion.
The pro-abortion researcher pointed out that the World Health Organization says the ulcer drug can be taken on its own to abort unborn babies, and it’s “used alone all over the world because it is much cheaper, less regulated, and more easily available than mifepristone due to its use in treating many other issues, including to induce labor.”
But Skop with the Charlotte Lozier Institute said misoprostol has a higher complication rate than the two-drug abortion method, and more lives will be endangered by the abortion industry’s contingency plans.
In a September article, Skop cited three different studies that show “how poorly misoprostol alone functions.” One 2010 study found that the ulcer drug also can cause birth defects when it does not kill the unborn baby.
She wrote:
… a 2010 study comparing standard mifepristone/misoprostol with misoprostol alone documented that using misoprostol only to induce an abortion led to a 23.8% failure rate requiring surgery. The embryo/fetus continued to survive in 16.6% of the pregnancies, and misoprostol is known to produce birth defects such as Moebius Sequence, associated with craniofacial and limb abnormalities, leaving these children at risk if the pregnancy continued to birth.[7] In contrast, there were 3.5% failures and 1.5% continuing pregnancies in the mifepristone/misoprostol group.[8] Similarly, a 2013 study demonstrated a failure rate of 38.8% when misoprostol alone was used vaginally and 29.8% when used sublingually (under the tongue).[9] Finally, a worldwide systematic review of more than 12,000 misoprostol abortions, performed by abortion advocacy researchers, found 22% (nearly one in four) required surgical completion because misoprostol failed to completely empty the uterus of the remains of the child.[10]
Another study that Skop pointed to exposed the dangers of online abortion drug sellers, finding that some sell doses much lower than the recommended amount to unsuspecting women.
An OB-GYN, she asked what will happen to rural women and girls who take the abortion drug at home without any medical supervision and suffer complications.
“[They] may not have immediate access to emergency care if the misoprostol fails,” Skop wrote. “How have we fallen so far from ‘safe, legal and rare’ to ‘illegal, necessary for every unintended pregnancy, and we really don’t care if it is safe as long as it kills the unborn’?”
A case before the U.S. Supreme Court, filed by doctors with the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, challenges the FDA’s approval and later expansion of the abortion drug mifepristone under Democrat presidential administrations.
The doctors said the FDA failed to 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.”
If the high court sides with the doctors, dangerous mail-order abortions could be prohibited in the U.S. as soon as the end of this week. Other regulations that were in effect for many years also would be reinstated.
The abortion drug mifepristone now is used for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Studies indicate abortion risks are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with about one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
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.
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.
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.
