OPINION:
The current easy availability of chemical abortion pills is obviously fatal to babies, but also poses a significant health risk to mothers and makes light of what we should all agree is, at very least, a morally weighty decision.
But under President Biden, the Food and Drug Administration weakened bare-minimum safety standards and in some cases got rid of them entirely, reducing abortion to just another convenience good.
Fewer Americans browse grocery store aisles because the stores deliver to customers’ doorsteps. Only a handful of college students are writing papers in the library because everyone has ChatGPT. Diet and exercise are now the sucker’s way to lose weight because Ozempic, we’re told, does it for you. Convenience is king, and its realm has recently expanded, hauntingly, to another industry: abortion.
An unwanted child can now be “taken care of” with two little pills and in the privacy of one’s own bathroom. Chemical abortions, unregulated and unsupervised, pose a serious risk to women and are a threat in the hands of anyone — women, girls, abusive boyfriends or pimps — who acquires these pills.
Chemical abortions, which number hundreds of thousands per year and now constitute a majority of abortions, require taking two drugs. The first is mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, the hormone essential for sustaining pregnancy. Progesterone preserves the uterine lining, the stable, life-supporting environment any developing baby needs. When progesterone is impeded, the baby is starved to death.
Twenty-four to 72 hours later, the pregnant woman takes the second pill, misoprostol. This drug induces labor, expelling the baby’s body from the womb. As this process takes place in the home, the toilet takes care of the rest, except in one out of every 22 cases in which a woman is admitted to the emergency room after taking these drugs (according to the drug’s own safety warnings).
Very little effort is required to purchase these abortion pills. Readily available online, they can be delivered to your front door without having to speak to anyone. Providing a delivery address and checking a few boxes to “confirm the pregnancy is in the first trimester” is the extent of the verification process in some places, even in states where abortion is illegal.
With a surgical abortion, it is difficult to disguise the seriousness of what is happening. Abortion clinics may try to minimize second thoughts — discouraging ultrasounds, for example — to keep the mother’s mind off her baby. But a woman must go to a clinic, speak with someone in scrubs, and undergo an invasive medical procedure. Swallowing the mifepristone and misoprostol pills at home, however, sounds like it requires no more effort than popping a couple ibuprofen for a headache.
While many women must agonize over taking these pills, allowing this technological pathway without any real warnings or procedure means a mother is not, by design, invited to contemplate the results of her decision in the same way a medical procedure would. Warning labels provide information, but they are easy to miss.
The mifepristone label itself states that 85% of women who take the pill will have “at least one adverse reaction.” In May, a study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center titled “The Abortion Pill Harms Women” was conducted, analyzing data from 865,727 mifepristone abortions. They found that more than 10% of women suffer from severe health repercussions such as “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
Additionally, the complication of these abortion pills is four times greater than that of a first-trimester surgical abortion.
There is no assurance that mothers are aware of the risks when they take these drugs. Because mifepristone and misoprostol are now “self-managed,” there is no real oversight or support, and there is reason to believe that the number of women taking these pills would drop significantly if they really knew what might happen to them as a result. Drugs this powerful must, at the very least, require an in-person visit, not be attainable to anyone with access to the internet.
Many assume the decision to abort is solely made by the mother, but studies prove otherwise. Pressure is not uncommon, as 60% of women report feeling pressured by other people to abort. These pills in the wrong hands could mean death for a mother’s baby against her will. There should be regulations and requirements for in-person visits with a physician so they could, at the very least, screen for contraindications to chemical abortion, such as ectopic pregnancies. Sometimes, as “mandatory reporters,” those in pregnancy clinics or even abortion mills can identify the abused and intervene.
It is our fervent hope that one day every child will be welcomed into life by a supportive family and community. In the meantime, abortion pills open up women, their babies and our communities to particular risks that exist for the convenience of the abortion industry, not the health and safety of women.
• Claire Sorenson is the administrative assistant to the executive vice president of The Heritage Foundation and Derrick Morgan is executive vice president.
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