(LifeSiteNews) — Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
Thank you for your tireless work to “Make America Healthy Again.”
As a fellow Catholic attorney, I would ask you to use some of your influence to put a spotlight on a much-overlooked area of health care misinformation as it relates to the abortion drug mifepristone. This inherently unsafe drug is used in a large majority of all U.S. abortions, with a huge percentage of those involving underage girls.
While there are differing stances on the issue of “choice,” I believe there is a huge common ground between women’s (and children’s) health and the pro-life movement, as the FDA has consistently neglected drug safety testing requirements for mifepristone. No matter how one feels about the abortion issue, there can be no real “choice” when the abortion pill is increasingly offered to pregnant women with no real understanding or disclosure of the significant health risks.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, as many as 20 percent of the women who undergo chemical abortions suffer complications, four times that of surgical abortions, including a shocking number of deaths. Chemical abortions are over 50 percent more likely than surgical abortions to result in an emergency room visit, affecting five percent of women who use them. As many as five percent of the chemical abortions fail to expel all the tissue, requiring surgery to complete the abortion.
A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to the FDA commissioner noted that the FDA’s adverse reporting system showed more than 4,000 reported adverse events since the year 2000, including some maternal deaths. In recent years, these numbers have been notoriously under-reported, since the FDA has now changed its rules to omit reporting requirements for non-fatal events. In effect, the FDA uses an “ostrich’s head in the sand” approach to ignore non-fatal adverse events and then pretends that the drug is “safe.”
Chemical abortions are particularly dangerous in cases of ectopic pregnancy, approximately 1-2 percent of all pregnancies. The FDA’s own data reports the deaths of multiple women taking the abortion pills with ectopic pregnancies. Shockingly, the FDA does not require any in-person evaluation or ultrasound as a safeguard to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy beforehand.
Ironically, while the drug manufacturer, doctors, and advertisers assure women that the drug is “safe,” even the FDA quietly admits that there can be dangerous, even fatal, reactions requiring emergency care, and that the abortion drugs do not even work in 2-7 percent of cases.
The FDA initially approved the abortion drug in 2000 based on flawed testing, bowing to pressure from the Clinton administration that made drug safety secondary to a politically driven abortion agenda. Things got even worse in 2016 when the FDA allowed at-home chemical abortions and in 2021, when the Biden FDA used COVID as an excuse for mail-order chemical abortions without any critical medical supervision.
The FDA’s testing procedures for mifepristone have flaunted the requirements for drug safety testing under real-world conditions, including special requirements for drugs that will be used by adolescent girls. The FDA in 2016 and 2021 eliminated critical safeguards that were conditions for the original drug approval, including requirements for the drug to be dispensed in person by qualified medical personnel and only during the first seven weeks of pregnancy. The FDA has simply ignored evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause far more complications than surgical abortions.
As you probably know, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case on this last year, but the Court’s decision was based on the plaintiffs’ lack of “standing,” not evidence. Since then, the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho have joined in the case to cure the “standing” problem. What we really need is some leadership by organizations like yours and the executive branch of our government to take a serious stand for women’s health.
I realize you have a lot on your plate as you work to protect Americans’ health from out-of-control federal agencies beholden to the interests of Big Pharma. I sincerely hope and request that you will add this to your list of concerns.
Thank you so much.
David Bjornstrom
Member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar
David Bjornstrom is a retired California attorney and member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar. Nothing in this article is to be considered legal advice or an examination of the law or passing upon the legal effect of any act, document, or law.