OPINION:
Amidst a surge in COVID-19 caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory against “health misinformation” that he says “can cause confusion, sow mistrust, [and] harm people’s health.”
Mr. Murthy says there is a “moral and civic imperative” to limit it. President Joe Biden went further, laying American lives at the feet of social media platforms like Facebook; he accused the companies of “killing people” by allowing users to share posts he considers misinformation about the virus or its vaccine. The message from the Biden Administration seems clear: People base life-altering decisions upon the health information they consume, and controlling that information has the potential the save lives.
But this purported concern for American lives is absent at Biden’s U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where pregnant women and their children have been abandoned to the predation and rampant medical disinformation of chemical abortion pill vendors. “Disinformation,” according to Mr. Murthy, is distinguished from the more benign “misinformation” in that it is spread maliciously, i.e., “for financial gain or political advantage.”
Things quickly went from bad to worse in the FDA’s world of chemical abortion pill regulation as the abortion lobby pounced on the COVID-19 pandemic to convince the FDA to introduce telemed or mail-order abortions nationwide, requiring only a remote communication between prescriber and patient before dispensing the drug. The dispensing protocol (called REMS) that was in place pre-pandemic required an in-person screening of the pregnant woman for potentially life-threatening contraindications before dispensing the abortion pill. Constrained by that protocol, the abortion industry still managed to kill millions of preborn children and two dozen women. But under the Biden Administration’s FDA, abortion vendors have been unleashed from these requirements and are currently engaged in death-by-mail operations.
Exposing the Administration’s hypocrisy, Biden’s FDA gutted chemical abortion pill safety standards on the same day the FDA halted the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine over concerns of six cases of blood clots in women and one death thought to be potentially associated with the vaccine. The FDA claimed this decision was made out of “an abundance of caution” – caution absent from the FDA’s simultaneous decision on deadly chemical abortion pills. While Americans were barred from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccines, the abortion industry was given a license to dispense chemical abortion pills in many states without ever seeing the pregnant woman in person.
This matters because a blood test and ultrasounds are the only methods of detecting potentially life-threatening or fertility-ending maternal risk factors. An ultrasound is the only way to rule out the presence of an ectopic pregnancy, for example, which can cause maternal death if not detected early (this has accounted for at least two abortion pill-related deaths). Hemorrhage and sepsis are life-threatening risk factors associated with chemical abortion. Abortion drug manufacturer Danco clearly states in its medication guide: “About 2 to 7 out of 100 women taking Mifeprex will need a surgical procedure because the pregnancy did not completely pass from the uterus or to stop bleeding.”
Based on current chemical abortion statistics, that means many thousands of women will need emergency follow-up treatment after ingesting chemical abortion pills. And without a follow-up ultrasound to ensure that the placenta and the child’s entire body was expelled during the abortion, women are left at risk of sepsis (which is responsible for one in three maternal deaths associated with the abortion pill).
And this is not merely a philosophical discussion. In a ruling issued last week, Indiana judge Sarah Evans Barker permanently enjoined Indiana’s law banning the dangerous practice of telemedicine abortions. With the ruling, Barker essentially blocked pregnant women from accessing screenings that could preserve their own lives so that, at a minimum, two individuals do not die in the chemical abortion process.
This week, Planned Parenthood of Montana filed a lawsuit to block four pro-life laws, including one that would require in-person distribution of Chemical Abortion pills, which Students for Life Action fought to pass.
But corporate abortion is not concerned with the trail of dead bodies left in its wake. The abortion industry – which sells death for profit – is driven by abortion sales. And the most recent data available suggest that those sales saw a huge spike during the pandemic. For example, between 2019 and 2020, chemical abortions “jumped by 34 percent” in Nebraska, constituting 71 percent of the state’s abortion deaths.
Protecting women’s lies and health falls to agencies like the FDA. In fact, the FDA is situated within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose website states that it achieves its mission by “serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, from conception.” By every measure, women and children have been abandoned to Corporate Abortion’s predatory practices by the federal government in contravention of the purported life-preserving goals spouted by the Surgeon General, HHS, FDA, and the President.
It’s time for the Surgeon General to issue a warning against death-by-mail. It’s time for Mr. Biden to express biting criticism of online abortion peddlers marketing the abortion pill as “Very safe!.” It’s time to crack down on the disinformation that pregnant women rely on abortion industry abusers to flourish (they do not). Failing to act sends a clear message to a nation reeling on the heels of a pandemic: The most powerful officials in the country will abandon entire swaths of vulnerable Americans for the sake of political expediency.
• Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America, with more than 1,250 groups on college, university, and high school campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.
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