(LifeSiteNews) — Twenty-two state attorneys general are calling for a review of the dangers of the abortion drug mifepristone, thanking the Trump administration for pledging to do so and highlighting reasons for the pills to be pulled from the market in the interim.
The letter, led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, commends U.S. Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Martin Makary for comments pledging a review, which has not yet taken place
“Based on that review, the FDA should consider reinstating safety protocols that it identified as necessary as recently as 2011 in its issuance of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, but which were removed by the Obama and Biden administrations,” the letter says.
The AGs extensively cite a study released earlier this year by the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC), which determined that almost 11 percent of American women suffer serious adverse events after taking abortion pills, a rate 22-times higher than what is reported on the drug label.
“The FDA’s removal of important safeguards starting in 2016 may explain in part why the real-world risk of serious adverse events from 2017–2023 is so much higher than the risk identified in clinical trials cited in mifepristone’s label, which contained many of the safeguards that were later eliminated,” the letter details.
“Yet, by the time the FDA implemented the current REMS in 2023, the FDA, under Presidents Obama and Biden, had increased the gestational age to 10 weeks and eliminated every other one of these requirements. Currently, a woman can obtain a mifepristone abortion by participating in only one telehealth visit with any approved healthcare provider (not necessarily a physician), ordering the drugs through a mail-order pharmacy, and self-administering them. And the prescriber is only required to report an adverse event if he or she becomes aware that the patient has died.”
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines has become arguably the abortion lobby’s most effective tactic for preserving abortion “access.”
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (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 Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
