In the shadow of the end of Roe, the Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in another case dealing with the government's involvement in life, specifically the ending of unborn lives via mifepristone, one of the drugs used in chemical abortions.
The case is Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and it revolves around the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) decision to relax restrictions — ones designed to protect women's lives — to make the drug easier to obtain. Specifically, whether the FDA's changes were "arbitrary and capricious," as the Fifth Circuit ruled in its decision against the Biden administration agency. The question now is whether the Supreme Court will agree with the lower court's ruling and uphold the decision requiring more stringent protocols to be followed.
The FDA's changes "increase the likelihood that a woman will mistake a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy for normal abortion-drug side effects," wrote Dr. Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs (AAPLOG), in the Wall Street Journal this week. AAPLOG is one of the lead plaintiffs in the case now being heard before the Supreme Court.
Dr. Francis explained what the FDA did and why it made already dangerous abortions even more fraught for women:
...the FDA, whose principal purview is safety, discounted the need to check for ectopic pregnancies when it revised its protocols for dispensing mifepristone, the primary drug used in a chemical abortion. Why should this matter? Because when a woman has an ectopic pregnancy but mistakes its symptoms for normal drug side effects, she will spend precious minutes or hours at home, which could be the difference between life and death.
In 2016 the FDA allowed nonphysicians to prescribe mifepristone and removed the requirement that the prescriber see patients for follow-up visits to evaluate them for potential complications, making it far less likely that an ectopic pregnancy would be diagnosed before it became life-threatening. In 2021 the agency eliminated the requirement that women be evaluated in person by any medical professional.
Yet the FDA’s label for mifepristone carries the warning: “Ectopic pregnancy: Exclude before treatment.” It also notes that “some of the expected symptoms experienced with a medical abortion (abdominal pain, uterine bleeding) may be similar to those of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.”
A woman today can acquire mifepristone with no screening for an ectopic pregnancy, and she may not even realize she has one until it is a full-blown medical emergency.
As Dr. Francis noted in her op-ed, it's not as though the FDA is unaware of the deadly complications. March for Life President Jeanne Mancini emphasized to Townhall that the "FDA's own label show[s] that roughly 1 in 25 women end up in the emergency room after ingesting these pills," yet "the agency does not require prescribers to report resultant medical emergencies like severe bleeding and sepsis." The only event providers must report is the death of the mother.
"We hope the FDA will be held accountable for failing to meet its own standards when it comes to abortion drugs," Mancini added. "Such reckless disregard for women's health and safety is unacceptable from an agency tasked with protecting it."
The lack of a required screening before obtaining mifepristone means that the drug can end up simply mailed into the hands of someone for whom it would be medically dangerous to take, be diverted to another party to keep a pregnancy hidden to avoid incriminating a third party in a crime, or administered without a pregnant mother's knowledge.
"These high-risk drugs are being mailed without verifying that the buyer isn’t an abuser or trafficker, and without so much as a follow-up visit to a doctor to check for life-threatening complications – even to states where life is protected by law," emphasized Katie Daniel, state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, in a statement to Townhall.
"This case is about the harm inflicted on countless women and girls by dangerous mail-order abortion drugs," Daniel added of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. "It is the story of how the FDA, the very agency tasked with ensuring Americans have safe medicines, put politics and industry profits before health and safety."
As Dr. Ingrid Skop — a 30-year veteran of practice as an OB-GYN and the Charlotte Lozier Institute's VP and director of medical affairs — underscored in a comment to Townhall, "I have seen how abortion drugs have harmed my patients, both mothers and their unborn children. I have cared for many of these women in the ER, even though abortion advocates pretend they don't exist," Dr. Skop recalled.
A majority of the American people, according to a poll conducted last spring for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, agree with these pro-life leaders. Sixty-one percent of registered voter said they "disagree that it is safe for abortion drugs to be distributed through the mail with little to no supervision."