WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee will hold a hearing January 14 on the dangers of abortion pills amid pro-life frustration over federal inaction.
The hearing, titled “Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” will entail “discussing how to uphold a culture of life and prioritize women’s safety over political ideology,” Cassidy told the Daily Wire. Details about witnesses and specific questions to be explored have not yet been announced, but the hearing will be viewable at this link on the committee’s website.
“As a doctor and a strong pro-life conservative, I am committed to protecting mothers and the unborn. The medical evidence is clear: chemical abortion drugs not only kill innocent babies but also put women in serious danger,” said Cassidy, the committee’s chairman.
Mailing abortion pills across state lines to be taken in complete privacy has been one of the abortion lobby’s top methods for undermining state pro-life laws, regardless of the medical risks the pills carry for women, that are compounded by taking them without medical professionals on hand to immediately deal with complications.
A November 20 letter, led by Republican U.S. Reps. Chris Smith of New Jersey and Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, to federal health officials asked that the “deleterious and grossly underreported effects on women of the drug mifepristone be aggressively investigated and decisive action taken to protect women from harm,” and urged “immediate action be taken to, at a minimum, reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone.”
It highlighted an April analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) that concluded that almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, plus similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation, as part of a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.”
Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s professor Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
Questions are currently swirling over when and how the Trump administration will handle the problem. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to moderate the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that Trump would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.
Pro-lifers were given hope in May that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who moderated during his own presidential bid) promised in May a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills, though no conclusions or timetable have since been announced. But some pro-life leaders have recently called for the firing of U.S. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over reports, which he denies, that he is intentionally “slow walking” the review.
