SHOCK: Large-Scale Abortion Pill Study Finds Almost 11% Suffer Serious Adverse Event

The FDA approved mifepristone for chemical abortions about 25 years ago, not so shockingly during the waning days of the presidency of noted lecher Bill Clinton. Its use has gradually risen over the years, and it now accounts for roughly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S.

Naturally, its use skyrocketed in the last five years due to two factors: the explosion of telehealth since the COVID-19 pandemic and the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Shortly after Dobbs, my friend and colleague Athena Thorne wrote about this dangerous phenomenon.

“With some states electing to restrict most abortions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, DIY abortion-by-mail will certainly become more prevalent,” Athena pointed out. “And the ‘It’s just a clump of cells’ crowd is hard at work, selling desperate girls and women the seductive fairytale that they can simply take a pill and make it all go away, and everything will be just as it was before. Pray for them all.”

Professor and baby-killing advocate Carrie N. Baker wrote a piece in Washington Monthly last week crowing about how the advent of mifepristone via telehealth allows the pro-aborts to “outsmart” the pro-life movement. It’s a gross column filled with flamethrowing rhetoric — including a reference to the “increased criminalization of pregnancy.” (Don’t make your head hurt rolling your eyes at that line.)

Baker’s disgusting cheerleading for killing babies with a pill explains how mifepristone via telehealth not only allows women to get around abortion bans in red states, but it’s also cheap — sometimes free, but at least noticeably less expensive than a clinical abortion. She also traffics in the lie that mifepristone is safe for the women taking it.

“These new avenues to abortion, both inside and outside of the medical system, work so well because the two medications used for abortion—mifepristone and misoprostol—are 97.4 percent effective and safer than Tylenol,” Baker writes. “Mifepristone blocks progesterone, which stops a pregnancy from developing. Then, 24 to 48 hours later, the patient takes misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions to expel the pregnancy tissue, usually within several hours.”

Disgusting. But the “reproductive freedom” movement relies on outdated, cherry-picked data to discuss how “safe” the abortion pills are. The data proving the “safety” of mifepristone has long relied on small samples sizes, and Democratic administrations have taken all the guardrails off the use of the abortion pills.

The original approval during the Clinton administration required three in-person visits, a prescription from a doctor who would administer the drugs in the office, and mandatory reporting of adverse events. The Obama-era Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) reduced the number of doctor visits to one and stripped away the requirement to report adverse effects, and the Biden administration’s REMS from 2023 took away any requirements for visits to a doctor.

A new report shows how dangerous these drugs are. The Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) released its report on Monday with some startling findings:

This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.
The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.
The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.

The FDA has relied on clinical trials of roughly 30,000 women to assert the safety of mifepristone, but the EPPC’s report looked at 28 times as many cases. The dataset is more recent than any information the FDA relies on as well.

“The women in our dataset are broadly representative of the women who obtain mifepristone abortions in the U.S.; they are not a prescreened group of generally healthy women recruited into various clinical trials conducted at different times around the world,” EPPC states and adds, “The women in our dataset receive (or fail to receive) pre- and post-abortion healthcare of the real-world quality that prevails in the U.S. today, not the carefully controlled regimen of care that ordinarily prevails in a clinical trial.”

Issues like “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event” don’t sound like mifepristone is “safer than Tylenol” to me. Then again, this cocktail of drugs is designed to kill, so should we be shocked?

Leftists like to tell us to “trust the science.” Do you think they’ll trust this science that bucks their narrative? I think we know the answer to that. But here’s hoping the FDA will reconsider this dangerous pill regimen.

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