What we don’t know about abortion can hurt us

OPINION:

On the surface level, it seems our federal health officials err very much on the side of caution, even when the evidence is minimal. In February 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an official warning to consumers about Abbott brands of baby formula following a possible contamination at a factory that might have been linked to some illnesses or deaths.

During the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA put a sharp halt on some vaccines in light of one death and several other complications. This summer, the FDA denied JUUL authorization to market e-cigarettes even though “the FDA has not received clinical information to suggest an immediate hazard.” The possibility of harm was enough justification to act… unless the concerns are about abortion.

Abortion in America is marketed by its proponents as completely safe. The problem is that the conversation ends with “don’t ask, don’t tell” style assurances because there is no national abortion reporting law tracking or monitoring a chemically or surgically induced event impacting women across the country. What makes this a problem is President Biden and his Democratic Party allies are pledging that more abortion is the one thing voters can count on them, as crime and inflation spiral out of control. But is more abortion a good thing for women? Its impact on the preborn is more than painfully obvious.

The most plentiful U.S. abortion data comes from groups like the abortion-industry think tank that Planned Parenthood founded, the Guttmacher Institute; abortion sales teams such as Rebecca Gomperts and her compatriots who operate an international chemical abortion empire, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which admits that their data is only voluntarily submitted from states and isn’t even submitted by America’s most abortion-friendly locations like California and Maryland.

Trusting the abortion data self-servingly offered up by the abortion industry is like trusting the tobacco industry to be the sole provider of all information on the harms of cigarette smoking. In fact, their voluntary reporting system has been found to underestimate the total abortion count by hundreds of thousands each year.

The public must rely on piecemealed data that abortionists offer voluntarily or from research often sponsored by Corporate Abortion’s allies in places like the Bixby Center, funded by abortion industry money, hardly an unbiased source.

The true proponent of women’s safety would be asking why we have to get reliable abortion data from places like Finland instead of our own country, or why chemical abortion-related Emergency Room visits have risen 500% over the last decade, or why we aren’t talking about the 26 women we know have died after taking chemical abortion pills, according to the FDA.

Our failure to track abortion results, complications, and long-term impacts create a lie in both surgical abortion and chemical abortion pills marketing. This also makes the federal government’s success in further stripping safety standards (called REMS) from chemical abortion drugs this past winter even more reckless as the pills carry a risk of injury, infertility, and even death.  

Most significantly, it’s impossible to credibly make the claim that abortion is safer than childbirth (which even the CDC pointed out was a faulty premise because of the poor data pool).

But rather than assess abortion’s true impact, pro-abortion advocates turn their attention elsewhere. Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who has been on the warpath for pregnancy help centers since the reversal of Roe v. Wade) is targeting pro-life centers again, demanding to see their client data. Ms. Warren’s curiosity regarding those handing out free diapers and formula is sorely lacking regarding those handing out abortion pills and committing surgeries without meaningful oversight or follow-up.

If Ms. Warren’s concerns related solely to clients’ data or failure to uphold standards of reporting, she should be equally enraged over the behavior of abortionist Ulrich Klopfer in Indiana who failed to report multiple cases of statutory rape and kept client records in his garage (alongside more than 2,000 bodies of his aborted victims.).

What we don’t know about abortion can hurt us, especially when considering the impact of abortion on women’s future fertility.  

The safety of women should concern everyone, both pro-choice and pro-life. It’s a frequent plea lately from our fellow citizens that our leaders should seek common ground when possible. On an issue as contentious as abortion, everyone should be able to support a National Abortion Reporting Law after this election. On this issue, a federal responsibility is clear, as the CDC surveys a national audience.

What is known about abortion in America comes voluntarily from the abortion industry itself, a boon every industry must envy. What business would turn down the freedom to issue its own reports on product safety? What competent government would trust those assurances?

• Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America & Students for Life Action with more than 1,300 groups on educational campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.