On Tuesday, January 3rd, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) further loosened restrictions on sales of the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone, flinging the door open to allow corporate-owned and neighborhood pharmacies to dispense the potent, deadly drug. For the first time, major chains like Walgreens and CVS will potentially be party to distributing chemicals to intentionally cause the deaths of preborn babies.
Previously, mifepristone could only be dispensed by a small number of mail-order pharmacies, as well as hospitals, clinics, and medical offices under the supervision of a licensed physician. Mifepristone is used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol, to cause a chemical abortion. Mifepristone blocks the natural hormone progesterone, causing the death of the unborn baby, while a second drug, misoprostol, causes powerful, painful uterine contractions to expel the dead baby.
“Biden’s FDA is willfully ignoring true dangers to women, making it as easy as possible to abort healthy preborn babies, and padding the pockets of Big Pharma and the abortion industry,” said Jeanne Gawdun, KFL Director of Government Relations. “Their moral bankruptcy knows no bounds and is just another reason why both educational and legislative efforts should move forward to give women full information about risks to their bodies as well as the possibility of reversing the effects of the abortion pill protocol.”
The November 2022 block of our state’s telemedicine abortion ban combined with a legal directive from the U.S. Department of Justice to ignore abortion pill mail restrictions, raises concerns that Kansas will be used as a hub for a chemical abortion pill trafficking operation to abortion-free states.
The FDA’s actions yesterday will inevitably increase the number of abortion providers and follows other recent, slackening of chemical abortion restrictions put in place for the safety of women. The FDA’s failure to meet its legal obligations to protect the safety, health and welfare of girls and women led four national medical associations to sue the federal government for approving chemical abortion drugs known to harm girls and women in November 2022.
Other chemical abortion safety protocols that have been recently changed or eliminated by the FDA include:
- widening the permitted timeframe of use for chemical abortion drugs—from seven weeks to 10 weeks gestation—increasing the mother’s risk of adverse complications.
- reduced the number of required in-person doctor visits from three to zero
- expanded who could prescribe and administer chemical abortion drugs beyond medical doctors
- removed the requirement to report non-fatal complications from chemical abortion drugs, leading to significant underreporting of adverse events.
“The next step for the pro-life movement? Take this battle to the doorstep of every local pharmacy where we expect to buy drugs to heal, not kill. We’ve got to let our pharmacies know we won’t tolerate them profiting from such a barbaric, dangerous business, or we will take our hard-earned dollars elsewhere,” said Danielle Underwood, KFL Director of Communications.