OPINION:
With the Supreme Court’s new term underway, we should know soon whether the court will review a case on the way the abortion drug mifepristone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 and whether it should continue to be dispensed by mail.
A tragedy revealed late last month in Nevada is unrelated to the case sent to the Supreme Court but could help counter claims about the drug’s safety made by the manufacturer and abortion sellers, and endlessly repeated by the mainstream media.
According to a lawsuit filed in District Court in Clark County, Nevada, the 24-year-old mother of a 9-month-old boy went to Planned Parenthood on Sept. 22, 2022, because she was pregnant again. Alyona Dixon was determined to be eight weeks and five days pregnant and a candidate for chemical abortion.
She was given mifepristone and sent home with instructions to take the second drug, misoprostol, 24 to 48 hours later, and to administer it intravaginally.
On Sept. 26, four days after taking mifepristone, she went to an emergency room run by Dignity Health at its Blue Diamond campus in Las Vegas, about 60 miles from her home in Parumph. Dixon was complaining of sharp lower abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. A radiologist who reviewed an ultrasound performed on the young woman believed parts of her aborted embryo could still be present in her womb.
According to the lawsuit filed on behalf of Dixon’s husband and son, the physician treating her did not conduct a pelvic exam and did not consult an OB-GYN because the hospital did not have one on call. Dixon was sent home.
The next night, Sept. 27, she went to a hospital in Parumph complaining of vaginal bleeding and abdominal pain but by now she was also vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. As her condition worsened, she was taken to Summerlin Hospital in Las Vegas, where she was pronounced dead at 5:32 a.m. on Sept. 28.
The Clark County Coroner’s Office later determined the cause of death as “complications from septic abortion.”
The wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family names only the first hospital and the doctors and nurses who treated her as defendants. Planned Parenthood has not been sued. And it certainly seems, as the suit alleges, that proactive treatment at the first hospital might have led to a better outcome.
But the point that cannot be missed is that chemical abortion is what sent her to the hospital in the first place. Had she not taken those drugs, she would be alive today, perhaps a busy mother of two children under 2.
A few news outlets in Las Vegas and the anti-abortion media have reported on Dixon’s death, but from the news networks and the major print media, not a word. That’s because her death after a chemical abortion directly counters the lie that the procedure is safe and easy and no big deal.
More than half of abortions performed today are chemical abortions, and how often women are injured is largely unknown because the FDA stopped collecting information on “adverse reactions” other than death.
Alyona Dixon’s death will not be blamed on chemical abortion, but had she not taken the pills, she would be alive today.
Chemical abortion is not safe. A study published in 2021 in the National Library of Medicine found that 20 women died from chemical abortion between September 2000 and February 2019. Nine women died of sepsis, and another died of hemorrhage.
“Retained products of conception and hemorrhage caused most morbidity,” the report said.
In addition to the deaths, there were 2,660 adverse reactions in that time period, with 529 considered life-threatening.
Twenty deaths may not seem like much, but we know that chemical abortion deaths — all abortion deaths — are attributed to other causes whenever possible. It’s not permissible in our country to utter a bad word about abortion, even when it turns deadly for moms.
How many deaths it will take to get this drug off the market is a question that has yet to be answered. If the Supreme Court decides to review the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, any protective action the justices might take will be too late for Dixon.
But other young women might be spared a terrible, preventable death.
• Janet Morana is executive director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. She is the author of “Recall Abortion, “Shockwaves: Abortion’s Wider Circle of Victims” and “Everything You Need to Know About Abortion — for Teens.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.