Earlier this week, 23 pro-life leaders sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn asking him to remove the abortion pill from the U.S. market. The letter points out that the abortion pill, also known as RU-486 is considered so dangerous that it has been placed under the FDA’s Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy (REMS) and that when it was approved in the U.S., the FDA accelerated the approval process, a move that is “usually reserved for high-risk drugs used to cure life-threatening illnesses, even though pregnancy is not an illness and the abortion does not cure or prevent any disease.”
The abortion pill ends the life of an unborn child and poses serious dangers to women, having been documented to result in severe complications and even death. A recent study found the abortion pill to be four times more dangerous to women than surgical abortion, and in the U.S. alone there have been over 4,000 adverse events from the abortion pill reported to the FDA, and 24 deaths since RU-486 was legalized. The letter notes that only the prescribing facility is required to report adverse events, and many women seek care at an emergency room instead of returning to the abortion facility. As such, we don’t know the true number of adverse events caused by the abortion pill in the past 20 years.
Despite the dangers of the abortion pill, abortion activists have been calling for loosened restrictions, and a federal judge recently granted the ACLU’s request to waive the REMS requirement on the abortion pill during COVID-19 related closures. This means that women will be able to obtain the abortion pill without a physical examination confirming that they are pregnant, whether or not they are past the tenth week of pregnancy, and whether or not they have an ectopic pregnancy. This greatly increases the danger that the abortion pill poses to women. The FDA has since filed an appeal, arguing that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang’s decision will cause irreparable harm.
As abortion activists continue to push for relaxed regulations on the abortion pill, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the abortion industry is not concerned about the safety and well-being of women. Banning the abortion pill would save the lives of unborn children and protect the safety of women.
