WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Two pro-life Republican members of Congress have taken to The Hill to make the case against the Biden administration’s “reckless” approval of abortion pills to be mailed across the country for women to take without medical supervision or on-site support while expressing hope that finally “accountability could be on the horizon.”
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, allowing states to directly ban abortion and reactivating numerous old abortion laws, the abortion lobby and its Democrat allies have been scrambling to enact a number of strategies to preserve abortion “access” across state lines.
Among those moves was the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) eliminating the requirement that abortion pills only be dispensed in-person to the women taking them, and the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declaring that abortion pills may be freely mailed across the country, despite the fact that a provision of a 150-year-old law called the Comstock Act that expressly says the opposite.
“Despite weak reporting requirements, we know of at least 28 deaths of pregnant women and more than 500 life-threatening complications associated with mifepristone — on top of thousands of serious adverse events,” Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, chair of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, and Republican Rep. August Pfluger of Texas wrote in an op-ed published February 27. “Chemical abortions are four times more dangerous to the mother than surgical abortions and can cause serious complications. Compared to surgical abortions, women who use chemical abortion drugs are 50 percent more likely to require emergency care within 30 days of use.”
“In approving abortion drugs, FDA grossly abused an expedited approval process by treating pregnancy as an ‘illness’ and asserting that the drugs provide ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit’ over existing treatments,” they argued. “The FDA also failed to comply with its obligations under federal law to study the impact of the drugs on adolescent girls and failed to prove their safety under the labeled conditions.”
The lawmakers noted that Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, a lawsuit currently being considered by the Northern District of Texas, could “rein in the FDA for unlawfully exceeding its authority in putting the health and safety of women and girls in jeopardy, and for running afoul of” the Comstock Act.
The lawsuit is brought by Alliance Defending Freedom, representing Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, and doctors Shaun Jester, Regina Frost-Clark, Tyler Johnson, and George Delgado. ADF calls it the “first lawsuit of its kind.”
Hyde-Smith and Pfluger urged the courts to not “give in to the intimidation and scare tactics of pro-abortion forces,” such as Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon urging the Biden administration to “ignore” and “resist” any ruling against the policy. Wyden likened the judiciary’s potential determination that the executive branch could not ignore federal law on abortion pills to the judiciary denying human rights to black slaves.
“We again call on the FDA to pull the deadly abortion drug mifepristone from the market, or at the very least, restore the health and safety requirements that have been callously and recklessly dismantled by the Biden administration,” the lawmakers wrote. “Since the FDA continues to fail in its duty and exceed the powers given to it by Congress, we will continue to support efforts through the courts to hold the FDA accountable. Women and their unborn children deserve nothing less.”
A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
A recent letter by 19 state attorneys general notes that even the left-wing American College of Obstetrics & Gynecologists (ACOG) has found that chemical abortions are almost six times as likely to result in medical complications as first-trimester aspiration abortions.
Pro-lifers argue that with the Biden administration completely eliminating requirements that abortion pills be taken under any medical supervision or with medical support close by, those events are certain to increase.
Yet the White House and the abortion lobby have determined that, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade restoring states’ ability to decide their own abortion laws, easy distribution of abortion pills will be one of their chief methods of preserving abortion “access.” In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 has led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, but the chemical abortion business has “surged,” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol.