The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision under the Biden administration to loosen safety restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone led to an increase in serious health complications for women, according to a March 10 report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC).
As Zeale News previously reported, the Biden FDA removed the drug’s in-person dispensing requirement and allowed it to be mailed directly to patients. According to the EPPC, the FDA had required an in-person doctor visit before the drug could be prescribed from 2000 until July 2020, when a federal judge temporarily blocked the requirement. The report stated that the rule briefly returned in early 2021 but was later suspended during COVID-19 and permanently removed in January 2023.
The EPPC report – which examined prescription and safety data from 2017 to 2023 – found that the policy change coincided with a measurable rise in adverse events. According to the report, the rate of serious complications from chemical abortions rose from 10.15% when the in-person requirement was in place to 11.50% after it was removed – an increase of 1.35 percentage points.
The rate of women who took the drug during ectopic pregnancies rose by more than 50% after the in-person requirement was lifted, the report also found. The abortion pill can be deadly if taken during an ectopic pregnancy – a condition in which the unborn child implants in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus.
“Without requiring an in-person doctor visit, anyone can go online and get mail-order abortion pills,” EPPC President Ryan Anderson said in a press release. “There is no way to ensure that the unborn baby hasn’t grown so large that chemical abortion is unsafe for the mother, no way to ensure that the unborn baby isn’t implanted outside of the uterus where using chemical abortion drugs could prove deadly to the mother, and no way to ensure that it’s the mother who is voluntarily requesting the chemical abortion drugs and not a boyfriend seeking the pills to secretly and coercively poison her.”
Pro-life advocates have repeatedly urged the Trump administration to reinstate mifepristone’s earlier safety requirements. Meanwhile, numerous states have sued over the FDA’s policies, arguing that the mail-order rule violates states’ pro-life laws by allowing abortion pills to be shipped into states that have banned abortion.
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