Biden administration eases access to risky abortion drugs

WASHINGTON (BP) – Abortion-at-home pills may now be obtained through the mail under a permanent rule issued Dec. 16 by administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

The policy revision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made permanent an April announcement that it would not enforce during the COVID-19 pandemic a requirement that a woman must appear in person to receive mifepristone, the first drug in a two-step process known as medical or chemical abortion.

While mifepristone may still be dispensed in qualified health-care facilities, now it also may be mailed or delivered to a woman by a certified pharmacy.

“This is a tragic decision by the FDA,” said Elizabeth Graham, vice president of operations and life initiatives for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) in Nashville. “We should not be a society that allows a preborn life to be taken simply because the mail arrives. Life is far too precious to be discarded with such lack of dignity.”

Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, used Twitter to condemn the FDA action as a “[t]errible anti-women policy by the Biden Administration.”

Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, said in a written release, “This experiment with mail-order abortion is really a deadly experiment with women’s lives. These changes do not make this abortion process safer for women. What these changes do is make the process easier for the abortion industry.”

Abortion rights advocates welcomed the FDA’s action. Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s largest abortion provider and the recipient of over $500,000,000 each year in federal funds, described it as “a victory for public health and health equity. With abortion rights at risk like never before, the FDA’s decision is a long overdue step toward expanding people’s access to safe medication abortion.”

Medical/chemical abortions as a percentage of all abortions have increased dramatically in the last two decades. They rose between 2001 and 2017 from five percent of all abortions to 39%, even as the total number of the lethal procedures fell, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reported in 2019.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), a pro-life research organization, reported in November that a new study it conducted found “chemical abortion is consistently and progressively associated with more post-abortion [emergency room] visit morbidity than surgical abortion.”

An analysis of Medicaid claims information from 17 states that pay for abortions showed the “rate of abortion-related ER visits following a chemical abortion increased 507%” between 2002 and 2015.

“As a woman who has studied abortion trends on a state-by-state level and analyzed major studies on chemical abortion, I find today’s FDA decision to be historically bad,” said Tessa Longbons, a senior research associate at CLI. “The FDA is putting women and girls at considerable risk through regulatory malpractice.”

The FDA acknowledged reports of 26 deaths among women related to mifepristone since the drug’s approval for abortion use in 2000.