Pro-choice advocates, the media, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have presented the abortion pill mifepristone as a safe and effective method for terminating an unwanted pregnancy. However, it turns out that they were not telling Americans the whole story.
For over two decades, pro-life activists have sounded the alarm over life-threatening symptoms associated with the abortion pill. Nonetheless, the FDA, which is legally required to acknowledge those concerns, has seemingly refused to act. The FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has categorically stated that he has no intention of taking action.
However, a new analysis of the abortion pill-related medical insurance claims shows that the risk of users developing life-threatening complications after use was 22 times higher than the FDA and the abortion pill Mifeprex manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, reported.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center made the shocking discovery after analyzing Medicaid, TRICARE, Medicare, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and private medical insurance claims data. It discovered that between 2017 and 2023, approximately 692,873 women received 865,727 mifepristone prescriptions.
However, 10.9% or 94,605 of those prescriptions resulted in potentially life-threatening or serious adverse events, such as emergency room visits (4.7%), hemorrhage (3.3%), surgical abortion (2.8%), infection (1.3%), sepsis (0.1%), and other non-specific complications (5.68%) for women who had used the Kill Pill within 45 days. When adjusted for some women who suffer from “adverse events in multiple categories,” the rate of mifepristone-related complications was 10.93%. That rate is almost 22 times higher than the FDA’s reported 0.5%.
Additionally, the observation window of 45 days was conservative at best since some complications occur as late as 72 days.
“This study is the statistical equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry,” warned the Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson. “It reveals, based on real-world data, the shocking number of women who suffer serious medical consequences because of the abortion pill.”
The FDA arrived at its figure, which was crucial in approving the abortion pill, after analyzing ten clinical trials involving 30,966 women. However, the test subjects were hand-selected, pre-screened, “generally healthy women,” thus potentially not reflective of the general female population.
Additionally, the tests used potentially outdate methods, and some were carried out outside the United States. Similarly, the EPPC study claims that the Kill Pill prescribers are not mandated to report adverse events unless the patient dies.
“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,” the study blasted the FDA’s findings.
The Obama administration relaxed the requirements for obtaining the abortion pill by reducing the number of doctor visits, even allowing non-licensed individuals to prescribe the abortion pill. According to the study, a woman can receive the pill after “one telehealth visit” with any “approved healthcare provider” who does not necessarily have to be a physician.
When Biden took over, he relaxed prescription requirements, allowing women to receive the pill by mail. Similarly, the administration cleared the way for independent pharmacies, such as Walgreens and CVS, to dispense the abortion pill, allowing women to “self-administer drugs obtained from a mail-order pharmacy,” the study notes.
