Three Republican senators are asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether drug manufacturers have misrepresented the abortion pill’s safety and efficacy, harming thousands of women.
The abortion pill, now the most common method of abortion in the United States, is a two-drug regimen administered to kill a woman’s preborn child. The first drug, mifepristone, blocks the essential pregnancy hormone progesterone, cutting off blood supply and nutrients to the preborn baby. The second drug, misoprostol, causes the woman to go into labor and expel her now dead child.
For years, Planned Parenthood has claimed mifepristone is safer than common, over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol.
But a recent study conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found nearly 11% of women who abort their child with the abortion pill suffer from a serious adverse event, including sepsis, infection or hemorrhaging, within 45 days of taking mifepristone.
The study found that women are 22 times more likely to be harmed from the abortion pill than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) previously acknowledged.
The letter, signed by U.S. Senators Steve Daines, Jim Banks and Marsha Blackburn, cites the EPPC study as one of the reasons an investigation is warranted. The study reviewed data of mifepristone’s safety profile, collected over a 7-year period beginning in January 2017 – well before the FDA relaxed safety guidance on the abortion pill in 2021.
“What did these manufacturers know and when did they know it? What did they report or say to the FDA and when?” the senators ask. “We encourage the Department of Justice to initiate a federal investigation into the potential criminal and civil misconduct of chemical abortion manufacturers.”
The letter chronicles how former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden relaxed key safety guidelines regulating the use of the abortion pill.
Particularly, the Biden Food and Drug Administration ended the “in-person dispensing requirement” for mifepristone in 2021, allowing women to access the abortion pill through the mail without seeing a physician in person; and allowed retail pharmacies to begin selling mifepristone, rather than requiring licensed physicians to administer the drug.
The senators write, “It is unclear what processes, if any, the FDA … followed when loosening – and then waiving – the safety regulations originally put in place to protect women. It is also unclear if the FDA worked with the manufacturer of Mifeprex (the brand name of mifepristone), Danco Laboratories, in considering new data, new clinical trials, or real-world market analysis that justified doing away with safety standards.”
“Given the breadth of the data and the implications for public health, we respectfully urge swift action to determine whether federal law was violated that compromised the safety of American women,” they appealed.
The senators’ letter is another important step in cracking down on the dangerous abortion drug. After the EPPC released its study, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to conduct a “complete review” of mifepristone and its side effects. Secretary Kennedy said he had seen the EPPC’s data and described it as “alarming.”
Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.
