This Bill Could Save Lives

On Sunday, Breitbart posted an article about a bill that the West Virginia Senate passed on Friday.

The article reports:

State senators in West Virginia passed a bill on Friday that would outlaw sending abortion pills into the state.

Lawmakers approved Senate Bill 173 with a vote of 31 to 1 and two members absent, West Virginia Watch reported

West Virginia has a near-total abortion restriction and also bans abortion via telemedicine. Senate Bill 173 is designed to close a loophole in state law enabling out-of-state organizations and abortionists to mail abortion pills to people in the state.

The bill’s lead sponsor, state Sen. Chris Rose (R), said the bill would show “bad actors” that West Virginia will not tolerate those who shirk the state’s laws protecting unborn babies, according to the report.

“We will fight from the womb to the tomb to preserve every human being,” Rose said. “And we will defend the constitutional rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness even for the unborn.” 

Under the bill, non-medical professionals could face three to ten years behind bars for the felony charge of sending abortion drugs by mail to a person in West Virginia. A medical professional who does so would face losing their license, according to the report.

The bill contains an exception for physicians who prescribe the drugs for other legitimate medical reasons besides abortion, per the report.

Lawmakers approved at least two amendments to the bill, including one from state Sen. Eric Tarr (R) that would require the state attorney general’s office to report how many lawsuits are filed on behalf of women who use the abortion drugs.

The bill now goes to the House of Delegates.

The danger of obtaining mifepristone, the abortion drug, through the mail is that the drug can have complications if used for abortion. If there is not a doctor on site supervising, using the drug could be fatal.

According to PubMed:

Methods: Adverse Event Reports (AERs) for mifepristone used as an abortifacient, submitted to the FDA from September 2000 to February 2019, were analyzed using the National Cancer Institute’s Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAEv3).

Results: The FDA provided 6158 pages of AERs. Duplicates, non-US, or AERs previously published (Gary, 2006) were excluded. Of the remaining, there were 3197 unique, US-only AERs of which there were 537 (16.80%) with insufficient information to determine clinical severity, leaving 2660 (83.20%) Codable US AERs. (Figure 1). Of these, 20 were Deaths, 529 were Life-threatening, 1957 were Severe, 151 were Moderate, and 3 were Mild.

The deaths included: 9 (45.00%) sepsis, 4 (20.00%) drug toxicity/overdose, 1 (5.00%) ruptured ectopic pregnancy, 1 (5.00%) hemorrhage, 3 (15.00%) possible homicides, 1 (5.00%) suicide, 1 (5.00%) unknown. (Table 1).

Retained products of conception and hemorrhage caused most morbidity. There were 75 ectopic pregnancies, including 26 ruptured ectopics (includes one death).

There were 2243 surgeries including 2146 (95.68%) D&Cs of which only 853 (39.75%) were performed by abortion providers.

Of 452 patients with ongoing pregnancies, 102 (22.57%) chose to keep their baby, 148 (32.74%) had terminations, 1 (0.22%) miscarried, and 201 (44.47%) had unknown outcomes.

Hemorrhage occurred more often in those who took mifepristone and misoprostol (51.44%) than in those who took mifepristone alone (22.41%).

Conclusions: Significant morbidity and mortality have occurred following the use of mifepristone as an abortifacient. A pre-abortion ultrasound should be required to rule out ectopic pregnancy and confirm gestational age. The FDA AER system is inadequate and significantly underestimates the adverse events from mifepristone.

Ending a baby’s life is not an acceptable practice, and with mifepristone, it could end your life as well.

Protecting Women’s Health

This is not an article to debate abortion. I believe abortion is wrong for a number of reasons, but that is not what this article is about. The link between Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger is troubling at best. The fact that the majority of abortion clinics are located in low-income neighborhoods is also troubling, but more troubling is the fact that the dangers of the abortion pill are being overlooked.

On Thursday, The Federalist reported:

More than 100 pro-life, pro-women, and pro-family organizations sent a letter to President Donald Trump’s top drug and health agencies asking them to “put the safety of women first” by reinstating the abortion pill safeguards stripped away by the Obama and Biden administrations.

“The danger this drug poses to women and girls is clear,” the letter states.

In the request to U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the coalition of concerned advocates warned that data shows “chemical abortion is neither safe nor effective.”

“In short, the FDA’s purpose is to safeguard the health and safety of Americans. In the case of mifepristone, these bedrock principles—necessary not only for the trust of Americans, but also for the safety of women—have been undermined by political whims that obscured the growing evidence of mifepristone’s harm,” the letter continues.

The letter highlighted a new landmark study, which determined that mifepristone, a key part of the drug regimen used to complete more than half of the nation’s abortions, has a rate of life-threatening or serious complications that is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and the pill’s manufacturer suggest.

Corporate media tried to blackout and undermine the study with smears that it is “bogus,” relies on “bad data, and amounts to “junk science” because it was not peer reviewed. The Washington Post even claimed that the discovery of mifepristone’s high injury rate is no big deal because it has a warning label.

Researchers Ryan Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall told The Federalist they were careful to exclude certain data, including 72 percent of emergency room visit diagnoses, to avoid overstating the risks of the drug. Even with that added caution, they found “11 percent of women who have a chemical abortion suffer a serious adverse event.”

Obviously, pregnancy is a natural reaction to a certain activity. It is a natural function of a woman’s body–it is not a disease that needs to be cured, and it is not simply a lump of cells to be destroyed. When you use a drug to interfere with the body’s natural function, there are going to be consequences. When that drug kills something that is attached to the body, there may be complications.

It’s time that the Food and Drug Administration actually worked for the benefit of Americans rather than for the benefit of drug companies. We have seen the scandals with tobacco, Oxycontin, the Covid-19 vaccine, and now the abortion pill. The agency needs either to go away or to change its paradigm.