Frederick Osborne was a tall man. Coming in at six feet and eight inches, the joke in the Army is that he was its tallest general — not that the average Army man ever ran across him anyway. His job was to make sure soldiers got continuing education and training, but it was a job he held at the height of World War II when most of those soldiers were busy taking back monasteries from the Fascists in Italy.
Osborne wasn’t the kind of man you’d think of when you think of Army generals in World War II. He’d spent a lot more time in a classroom musing over bizarre theories than he had with his boots on the ground and a gun on his shoulder. Osborne, you see, was a eugenicist.
His legacy as the Director of Information Education of the Army wasn’t all that notable. What he tends to be remembered for is his role in founding the Population Council at the behest of John Rockefeller. In his own words, the foundation was set up “for the study of population problems,” which is a polite way of saying it was interested in trying to figure out how to force eugenics down the throat of democracy. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 418: Louisiana v. FDA: Battle to End Abortions Via Mail)
Osborne died in early 1981. Unfortunately, the Population Council is still with us and owns the U.S. rights to mifepristone, the abortion pill now at the center of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Those rights were gifted to the Council by the French pharmaceutical company that originally developed the drug, and the eugenics-based justifications for it (and abortive practice like it) haven’t entirely faded from the conversation.
In a declaration submitted by the FDA, Dr. Jason Lindo, an economics professor at Texas A&M, made the case for mifepristone on grounds that would have sounded familiar to the Population Council’s founders. As one amici brief submitted to the court points out, Lindo “direly declares, under oath, that children who are not aborted may face difficulties in school, have ‘more behavioral and social issues,’ lower education levels, poorer health, and ‘an increased likelihood of criminal involvement.’”
FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine isn’t primarily focused on mifepristone’s safety — though, as has been noted elsewhere, the drug has had dangerously adverse effects on a concerningly large share of the women who have taken it. The case centers on the question of whether the FDA can allow the drug to be prescribed via telehealth across state lines. Given the Court’s recent decision to pause any limitations on the drug until the ruling is decided, things are not looking all that great for those of us who want to keep medication abortions out of states where abortion is illegal.
Unfortunately, even if the Supreme Court decides to favor the pro-life argument and force the FDA to reinstate the rule that requires inpatient consultations before prescribing the deadly drug, this country’s pro-abortion advocates are ready to adjust their tactics to ensure that more babies die — even if it means that they have to prepare women to potentially watch their baby die in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.
Earlier this week, Slate published an article meant to allay the fears of Americans concerned that women might not be able to kill their inconvenient offspring. Right now, nearly 10 percent (or some 100,000 people) “get their abortion medications through channels that bypass the U.S. regulatory system.” In other words, abortion providers already break the law to provide mifepristone to patients, and they are prepared to do that at a much larger scale. (READ MORE: Washington’s Abortion Pill Free-for-All Shatters Dems’ ‘Choice’ Façade)
But it doesn’t stop there.
You see, mifepristone is part of a two-step process. Its job is to artificially lower a pregnant woman’s progesterone production in order to deprive her unborn baby of oxygen — essentially suffocating the baby in her mother’s womb. Mifepristone is usually followed up by a course of misoprostol, a drug used to induce labor, and which Slate assures us is “just as safe and nearly as effective when used alone.”
To be clear, misoprostol, used in this way, forces a pregnant woman’s body to go into labor well before she’s ready. The baby is born prematurely, and is, at least for a short time, quite possibly very much alive. The thing with misoprostol is that it’s unlikely to ever really be banned, given that the drug was originally intended for entirely different uses.
Slate, of course, isn’t the only news platform recommending this form of murder to its readers. Cosmopolitan published a “Complete Guide to Misoprostol-Only Abortions” just a few days earlier. Don’t worry, the popular women’s magazine assured its readers, “you won’t see your embryo.” Never mind that the same article tells us earlier that misoprostol-only abortions are prescribed as late as 24 weeks in some countries — a point at which babies are viable and weigh close to two pounds. Grotesque doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Melissa Grant, the chief operating officer for Carafem (a company that prescribes mifepristone and misoprostol to patients via telehealth), told Slate that the abortion landscape has become “like a giant chess game, in which we need to continue to keep trying to anticipate the next movement, and to overcome it to plan our next move … What I have seen are more small groups of people coming together, saying, ‘We’re going to do this, no matter what.’”
To be clear, the “this” referred to is killing hundreds of thousands of babies by any means necessary.
The point is this: Making it illegal to kill a baby via drugs is a noble goal. But once we’ve finally gotten there, we can’t declare the job done and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, there are people so dedicated to the cause of depriving unwanted babies of their lives that they will do practically anything to persuade women that watching your baby die on a bathroom floor is totally normal.
We need to prosecute these people in any way we can for their murderous actions (something that becomes much easier when the law supports life) while trying to change the minds and hearts of the women being preyed on by pharmaceutical companies and foundations that benefit from the deaths of their babies.
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