On September 28, 2000, the Food and Drug Administration abandoned the healing purpose of medicine and entered the business of death when it approved the drug RU-486 for use in the United States. Now, two decades later, they have walked even further down that road and abandoned science, history, and the safety of women by removing the drug’s in-person safety requirements.
RU-486 is more commonly known as mifepristone, or the abortion pill. First introduced to the United States on the special request of the Clinton Administration; its history, connections, and approval are mired in controversy and irregularities.
Beyond the fact that its expressed purpose is to end a human life; the abortion pill is very dangerous to the health and safety of the women who take it. Out of the 2,121 women who took part in its pre-approval trial, 56 underwent surgical intervention for excessive bleeding. Not only that but 8% of the women had their babies survive and were encouraged to have a surgical abortion. Another 5% of the women never completed the study.
More recently a 2015 study by the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) found that the abortion pill is 4X more dangerous than surgical abortions.
Because of the high complication rate and serious medical emergencies encountered in the original study, when the FDA approved the abortion pill it attached a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) to its use. Among other things, the REMS requires that a woman must have an in-person medical examination before taking RU-486.
There are a few things that an in-person examination determines:
- Is the woman indeed pregnant? According to the Mayo Clinic reasons for a false positive pregnancy tests include: ectopic pregnancy, menopause, problems with the ovaries, or a recent miscarriage or abortion.
- Is the child alive? Between 10% and 20% of known pregnancies end in a spontaneous miscarriage.
- Is the pregnancy ectopic? An ectopic pregnancy is a life-threatening condition in which the embryo implants in a location outside of the uterus. In North America as many as 2% of all pregnancies are ectopic and it is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the first trimester.
- Does the mother have a Rh-negative blood type? Rh Incompatibility if gone untreated can cause hemolytic anemia in future pregnancies. By caving to the demands of big-abortion and the ACOG and using the COVID-19 pandemic to justify removing the REMS’s in-person requirement, the FDA has abandoned reason and put the lives of women at serious risk. Contrary to what the abortion industry says, telemedicine abortions are dangerous.
Last spring the United Kingdom also removed the in-person safety requirements on the abortion pill and the results were catastrophic. Within the first 52 days, two women had died, and multiple others required life-saving emergency care for hemorrhaging, sepsis, and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. In addition, women as far along as 32 weeks received the abortion pill in the mail, prompting 13 investigations into the death of babies that had been born alive.
There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: with this decision the FDA has thrown the health and safety of women under the bus in the pursuit of “reproductive freedom.” Make no mistake, it is unlikely that the FDA will properly enforce the abortion pill REMS when the pandemic is over. In the eyes of big-abortion and their allies, the REMS were simply a barrier to their goal of unregulated telemedicine abortions funded by American taxpayers.
The Food and Drug Administration: abandoning women for more than 20 years.