According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one in 25 women who have chemical abortions will end up in the emergency room. The FDA recklessly endangered women’s health by removing the safety standards it once provided to women using abortion drugs. The US Supreme Court has taken up a case challenging the FDA’s actions, and the outcome will determine whether the FDA will be held accountable for removing the safety standards it originally deemed necessary to ensure the health and safety of women and girls using abortion drugs.
The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 26 in the case of the Food and Drug Administration v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in an appeal to overturn a Fifth Circuit decision where the court did not remove the drug from the market as the District Court had ruled, but reinstated previous regulations requiring the drug be dispensed directly to the patient by a certified abortion provider and requiring several in-person visits with the abortion provider both before and after the abortion. Women should have the ongoing care of a doctor when taking high-risk drugs, and the FDA betrayed women and girls when it removed the necessary in-person doctor visits that protected women’s health and well-being.
In 2000, the FDA approved the use of chemical abortion drugs with several safety standards including three in-person doctor visits to check for ectopic pregnancy, severe bleeding and life-threatening infections. It required doctors to prescribe the drugs to pregnant women seven weeks or under gestationally and implemented reporting requirements for serious complications. After 16 years of requiring critical safety standards, the FDA egregiously removed them without sufficiently evaluating the impact on women’s health. In 2021 the FDA abandoned in-person office visits, acknowledging that women harmed by these drugs would need to rely on overcrowded emergency rooms and conceding that studies used to justify the decision were “not adequate.”
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Pro-women doctors have witnessed firsthand the harm to women and girls caused by the FDA’s reckless actions. Without a medical examination, gestational age and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies cannot be determined. Because of the FDA’s reckless actions, the rate of abortion drug related emergency room visits has increased more than 500% over the past 15 years. Women and girls are sold on chemical abortion drugs with a promise the affects will liken a heavy period, but reported affects include weeks of heavy bleeding, excruciating cramping, nausea, and delivering dead and alive babies at home. One woman said, “They didn’t tell me I would see its eyes and its fingers. They didn’t tell me I would be holding my dead baby.” Women and girls also aren’t told they will experience labor without a doctor’s help with severe pain and excessive bleeding as they suffer alone in their bathrooms, which have become their in-home abortion clinics.
While this case isn’t about abortion, rather about health and safety of the mother, the current FDA policies also violate rights of conscience by forcing emergency room doctors to finish abortions started with abortion drugs at home. Federal law requires Medicare funded hospital doctors to stabilize emergency room patients, which includes women suffering from incomplete chemical abortion and complications from the trauma. Because the FDA has neglected its duty to protect the health and safety of pregnant females, emergency room visits are common, forcing emergency room doctors to finish aborting unborn babies with beating hearts. This only helps pharmaceutical companies and the billion-dollar abortion industry while betraying women, girls and pro-life doctors.
In North Carolina, 66% of abortions are chemically induced. Thankfully, North Carolina’s SB 20, the “Care for Women, Children and Families Act” was passed last year which requires women to be examined by a doctor before being prescribed chemical abortion drugs to protect them from dishonest actors looking to financially and politically profit. NC Values Coalition’s sister organization, Institute for Faith & Family, filed an Amicus Brief in this case along with Alliance Defending Freedom, and we will be there at the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments.
Women and girls across the country have suffered severe, even life-threatening, complications because of the FDA’s lawless actions. While there is no such thing as a safe chemical abortion (a life is always taken), the FDA must be held accountable for violating its duty to protect women and girls. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will uphold the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision and do just that.
LifeNews Note: Tami Fitzgerald is the executive director of the NC Values Coalition.
