WASHINGTON — Nearly two-thirds of American women who pursue abortion are now using abortion pills rather than surgery to end their pregnancies, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
About 642,700 pregnancies — 63% of all abortions recorded in the health care system — were terminated in 2023 using abortion pills. That is up from 53% in 2020.
“Why is this happening? The system and the leaders of the system have left women to administer their own abortions alone in their bathrooms,” said Katy Taleno, executive director of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries. “Big Pharma has gotten exactly what it wanted from the FDA – an unregulated Amazon of abortion pills – illegally mailed across state lines in record numbers.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone for abortions back in 2000 but required a doctor visit at its administration and shortly thereafter to try to protect mothers from the drug’s most serious harms. But the FDA has now eliminated all requirements for in-person doctor visits, and the data showing increased utilization of these dangerous drugs shows the impact of looser regulation.
“In December 2021, the Food and Drug Administration made permanent a pandemic-era rule eliminating the requirement for patients to pick up abortion pills in person and allowing them to be delivered via mail,” the Washington Times reported. “Abortion pills have become more popular since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.”
About two dozen states have tightened limits on abortion, thus driving demand for pills to be illegally mailed across state lines, a practice that Congress outright prohibited under the Comstock Act.
Talento was among a group of medical professionals and pro-life health experts who spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court on March 26, the day the Court heard oral arguments in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.
The case involves the FDA’s challenge of a lower court ruling that it must reinstate the guidelines placed on the chemical abortion drug mifepristone when it was first approved 24 years ago. The FDA has since rolled back several of these safeguards, such as the requirement for in-person dispensing of prescribed mifepristone, which has opened the door for dangerous mail-order abortions with no medical supervision.
“Women should have the ongoing care of a doctor when taking a high-risk drug,” Talento said. “The FDA betrayed women and girls when it removed the necessary in-person doctor visits that protected women’s health and wellbeing. The FDA recklessly endangered women’s health by removing the safety standards it once provided to women using abortion drugs.
“This has opened the door for dangerous mail-order abortions with no medical help.
“Women and girls across the country have suffered severe, even life-threatening, complications because of the FDA’s lawless actions. The FDA’s own label on the drug concedes that up to 1 in 25 women who take the drug end up in the emergency room, and 1 in 33 women have to have surgery because the drug doesn’t work,” Talento said.
“The increasing dangers and immorality rampant in our so-called health care system suggest that it is all the more important for Christians to band together to support each other through communities such as Health Care Sharing Ministries – the only 100 percent pro-life option for financing medical bills.”
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries is a 501(c)(6) trade organization representing the common interests of Health Care Sharing Ministry organizations which are facilitating the sharing of health care needs (financial, emotional, and spiritual) by individuals and families, and their participants. The Alliance engages with federal and state regulators, members of the media, and the Christian community to provide accurate and timely information on health care sharing.
To learn more about the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, visit www.ahcsm.org or follow the ministry on Facebook or Twitter.
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To interview a representative from The Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, contact Media@HamiltonStrategies.com, Beth Bogucki, 610.584.1096, ext. 105.
To interview a representative from The Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, contact Media@HamiltonStrategies.com, Beth Bogucki, 610.584.1096, ext. 105.