Earlier this week, I wrote about the response of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of HHS, and Dr. Marty Makary, Commissioner of the FDA, to a July 31 letter from 22 state Attorneys General asking for a “full-scale review of mifepristone and its labeling based on objective data.”
When they wrote back on September 19, they assured that
Through the FDA, HHS will conduct a study of the safety of the current REMS [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy] in order to determine whether modifications are necessary.”
Not just “a study” but “its own review of the evidence, including real-world outcomes and evidence, relating to the safety and efficacy of the drug.” [Emphasis added.]
As Axios put it in their headline, “RFK Jr. sets off new abortion alarms.”
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But if the “abortion pill” (mifepristone), “is safe, effective, and essential,” as Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All insists, why the quasi-hysterical response to Kennedy/Makary’s assurance that “HHS is committed to studying the adverse consequences reported in relation to mifepristone to ensure the REMS are sufficient to protect women from unstated risk”?
For starters, that ensures that the truth of the gravity of “adverse consequences” will be more widely known. By the FDA’s own reckoning, between 2000 to 2012, there were “2,740 adverse events, including 415 events involving blood loss requiring transfusions.”
Noteworthy is that as of 2016, the FDA no longer required reporting of any complications other than death!
And the deaths of at least 36 women have been associated with the use of mifepristone.
For another it means an objective look at what difference the loosening of safety protocols has meant to women’s health.
Their letter went through the chronology of the decisions made by prior FDAs which moved from requiring relatively strict requirements in 2000 all the way to eliminating in-person visits altogether. The agency’s REMS, intended to safeguard women’s health, has been reduced to a shell of itself.
In a letter sent earlier this year, NRLC urged Makary to take decisive action to protect women and unborn children from dangerous chemical abortions.
“For years, the abortion industry has downplayed the dangers of mifepristone, ignoring the thousands of women who have suffered serious complications and the children whose lives are ended by this drug,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Women are being told these pills are as safe as Tylenol—nothing could be further from the truth. This is a reckless experiment on women’s bodies and their unborn children.”
Tobias continued, “Each abortion takes the life of a preborn child and places her mother at risk. Women aborting at home are also more likely to be traumatized when they realize that they aborted a living child and not just ‘tissue’ or ‘products of conception’ as the abortion industry claims.”
“MISSED, MISCLASSIFIED, AND MINIMIZED: Why Abortion Pill Complications Are Underreported” is National Right to Life’s most recent report. It covers why stories of women suffering from serious complications following the use of abortion pills aren’t known and haven’t been more widely publicized.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.
