Every day we make assumptions as consumers. We assume food labels list accurate ingredients. I’m allergic to guaifenesin, so I assume that if that’s listed on a cold medicine label, I should steer clear but if not then it’s safe for me to take.
We make these assumptions because a federal agency in Washington, the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, tells us we can. It’s their job to pre-clear drugs before they hit the shelves and to continue to monitor usage for any problems that we as consumers need to know about. We trust them to not put a drug on the market if it’s not safe and effective. And we trust them to pull a drug off the market if they learn new information that suggests it’s dangerous for consumers.
Yet from the beginning politics—not science—has driven the approval of abortion drugs, which now end the lives of hundreds of thousands of healthy babies each year in the United States alone.
There are two main types of abortion, surgical or drug-induced, and there is just one FDA-approved abortion drug regimen. It uses two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol. First, mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone which is needed for the baby to grow, and then a day or two later misoprostol induces labor and delivery, which almost always occurs at home.
Back in the 1990s when Bill Clinton came into office, he set abortion drug approval as priority #1 for his administration.. Unable to meet Clinton’s demands under its usual processes, the FDA had to reclassify normal, healthy pregnancy as an “illness” to push the approval through under a process reserved for serious illnesses like cancer.
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That is not the only place the FDA cut corners. It violated federal law by not requiring any drug trials focused on minors. It’s common sense that a hormone-blocking drug would affect a teenager going through puberty differently than a fully developed adult.
It got even worse under Barack Obama. In 2016, the FDA loosened up many of its rules on prescribing these drugs even though there was evidence that at least two dozen women had died. Shockingly, the FDA said it would only require reporting of deaths, but not of hemorrhage, follow up surgeries, infertility, or any of the other serious complications that routinely occur with these drugs. Five years later under President Joe Biden, the FDA claimed that the lack of complications data – the very same data it refused to collect – was proof that the drugs were “safe” and could be sent through the mail without a doctor’s visit.
Today, the FDA allows abortion drugs to be sent through the mail to anyone, even to minors without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The FDA’s lawyer recently stood up in federal court and said that under the new Biden admin rules, the agency would not even require a video visit to confirm that the recipient is a woman, let alone a pregnant woman who is a proper candidate for, or even wants abortion drugs. If my husband digs a pregnancy test out of the trash while I’m sleeping and emails a photo of it with my driver’s license to a “certified prescriber,” that’s perfectly fine with the FDA. Unsurprisingly, this is NOT fine for the women who are victims of abortion coercion and abuse
We have no choice but to trust agencies like the FDA. You and I cannot do our own research on drug interactions or manufacturing conditions. Despicably, the FDA has abused our trust, forcing us to make life-and-death decisions without the benefit of medical screening or even accurate information about the risks of taking these dangerous drugs.
This Spring, the Supreme Court will hear a case brought by pro-life physicians who have seen the damage these drugs can do firsthand. Some of them have been warning the FDA about their patients’ hemorrhages, infections, and follow up surgeries for twenty years. Yet the FDA has looked the other way, lining the pockets of a pharmaceutical company who argued to the Court that reinstating safety standards will cost them money.
We deserve better from the institution “responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs.” We deserve health agencies that choose public safety over the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical industry. Already two federal courts have said that the FDA likely broke federal law and its own rules when it turned a blind eye to the dangers of abortion drugs. The FDA may not think its rules are important, but I am optimistic that the Supreme Court will join the lower courts and reinstate patient safety as the top priority of our public health institutions.
LifeNews Note: Katie Daniel is State Policy Director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
