March 26th, 2024
By: Mike Pence
The Food and Drug Administration was established to protect public health by ensuring the safety of medicine. Tragically, when the FDA illegally approved the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone, it abdicated this duty in the name of promoting abortion.
This week, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to right that historic wrong.
In 2000, the FDA illegally approved mifepristone under rules that allow the agency to approve drugs that provide meaningful therapeutic benefits over existing treatments for serious and life-threatening illnesses, such as AIDS. Pregnancy, of course, is not an illness, and abortion is not a treatment. The FDA claimed otherwise, abusing its own regulation and illegally approving the abortion drug with tragic effects.
Chemical abortions are more dangerous to women than surgical abortions, as the FDA has known since it approved mifepristone. The rates of death from abortion pills are four times higher than that of surgical abortions. As of December 2022, 32 deaths have been reported as a direct result of mifepristone. Studies have shown that 10% of women who use mifepristone require follow-up medical treatment for a failed or incomplete abortion and 20% will experience adverse effects such as hemorrhaging or infections.
Yet, in the intervening decades since mifepristone’s approval, the FDA has continually placed women’s health at greater risk by further loosening restrictions regarding the use of the drug.
In 2016, the FDA under former President Barack Obama abandoned multiple safety protocols put in place when the drug was originally approved, including raising the maximum gestational age allowed for use from 7 weeks to 10 weeks. The risk of adverse events increases drastically as development progresses, yet the Obama administration disregarded science in the name of leftist ideology.
In 2021, the Biden administration made things worse by eliminating the requirement to meet in person with a healthcare provider, thereby allowing mifepristone to be prescribed through telemedicine.
Because of this action by the current administration, fewer pregnant women have had the opportunity for an ultrasound, which is critical in identifying the gestational age of the baby and in ruling out an ectopic pregnancy and other significant risks to the mother. Even worse, Biden’s telemedicine loophole makes it harder to confirm that a woman is not being coerced into performing an abortion against her will, leaving human trafficking victims open to even further exploitation.
Additionally, we know that abortion can leave long-lasting emotional scars. Our government should not allow women to be abandoned while undergoing the mental hardship that so often accompanies abortion.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this week in a case that seeks to address these injustices and correct the grave mistake made by the FDA more than two decades ago. The FDA originally approved mifepristone because it put ideology over the law. Likewise, the Obama and Biden administrations repeatedly expanded access to the drug because they put ideology over the law.
Now the Supreme Court can remind the agency’s left-wing ideologues that America is still a nation of laws. I encourage the court to reverse the FDA’s illegal approval of mifepristone and make a clear and unmistakable stand for women’s health and the right to life.
Read more here at the WashingtonExaminer.com.
