It has long been ignored that the Biden administration de facto guaranteed legal abortion in all 50 states just 15 days after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The administration, anticipating that the court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, announced that mifepristone, the drug that kills an unborn child, could be dispensed without an in-person visit.
Practically, this meant that networks of abortionists could ship abortion pills to women living in red states where abortion is illegal. Abortionists’ drug pipeline would be, for all intents and purposes, legal under federal law. (RELATED: Want to Crack Down on Drug Trafficking? Target the Abortion Drug Cartel)
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician himself, made this point emphatically at a press conference Wednesday following a hearing on the safety of mifepristone. (RELATED: The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster)
“The Supreme Court ended Roe,” Cassidy said, “but the FDA is allowing mifepristone to override state pro-life laws.” Cassidy noted that at least 76,310 babies were killed in red states through telehealth prescriptions enabled by the FDA’s mifepristone policies in 2024.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham echoed Cassidy’s point, arguing that state laws on abortion are practically nullified by the federal government’s policy of allowing mifepristone to be dispensed via telemedicine.
“The federal government is allowing a chemical abortion pill to be sent through the mail that wipes out every state unborn protection law in the land,” Graham said.
“You can’t say it should be a state issue and sit on the sidelines while the federal government … is sending the pill that undercuts everything people at the state have worked for.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Graham continued. “You can’t say it should be a state issue and sit on the sidelines while the federal government, through an agency, is sending the pill that undercuts everything people at the state have worked for.”
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who recently sought the extradition of a California doctor who dispensed abortion pills in Louisiana, explained how the Biden administration’s FDA rules on mifepristone were created for the express purpose of allowing abortion pills to be dispensed to pro-life states.
“They did that specifically with the avowed purpose of facilitating and encouraging people to send those pills by mail even to states where it is illegal,” she explained.
All of this raises the question of why, under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services and its subordinate agency, the Food and Drug Administration, have kept in place the very Biden policy that was intended to guarantee nationwide access to abortion. This question is made even more baffling when considering the dangers of allowing mifepristone to be dispensed over the internet (simply when accounting for the health and safety of the mother).
A study published last year by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 11 percent of women who took mifepristone experienced at least one “serious adverse event.” These included sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, and other events that were deemed to be “life-threatening.”
Additionally, the previous guidelines put in place by the FDA for mifepristone required a doctor to date a pregnancy and diagnose whether there was an ectopic pregnancy. Practically, this meant that an in-person ultrasound was necessary. This was for two very specific reasons. First, if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, taking an abortion pill can be incredibly dangerous because it could cause a woman to believe the bleeding she is experiencing from an ectopic pregnancy results from the abortion pill. Therefore, she could fail to seek treatment for the life-threatening emergency she is facing. Second, mifepristone can be extremely dangerous if a woman is further along in her pregnancy than she thinks, or if she falsely claims not to be as far along as she is. Significant bleeding, hemorrhage, shock, incomplete abortion, infection, sepsis, uterine rupture, or a continued pregnancy with severe complications could occur. Sepsis could happen because at 15 weeks gestation, for example, the baby is nearly 7 inches long, and some of the baby’s body parts may remain in a woman’s uterus after she takes abortion medications. This could cause bacteria to flourish and then enter her bloodstream.
The Biden administration’s 2021 decision to require zero in-person doctor’s visits for the prescription of mifepristone is not the first time Democrats have played the game of making abortions more dangerous so that they are more accessible.
In 2016, as Barack Obama’s presidency reached its end, his administration removed the second of the previously required doctor’s visits for mifepristone, despite the fact that follow-up visits had frequently been used to monitor and treat infection, hemorrhaging, and sepsis that had occurred because of the medication. Obama also increased the age of babies that could be killed by mifepristone from 7 weeks gestation to 10 weeks gestation. (At 10 weeks, a baby’s vital organs are mostly formed.) His administration also took an action that would conceal the real dangers of mifepristone: no longer requiring doctors to report non-fatal adverse events.
All of these dangers, put on top of the reality that these Biden-era FDA rules negate any state pro-life laws, make the FDA and HHS’s decision to keep these rules in place inexplicable.
Further illustrating the ideological rather than scientific nature of these FDA rules was the testimony of Dr. Nisha Verma. Verma refused to tell Sen. Josh Hawley whether men can get pregnant. “I do take care of patients with different identities,” she said, before going on to say that “some” of her patients “don’t identify as women.” That certainly made Vera’s claim that the safety of mifepristone “is not a matter of opinion or debate” less believable.
So, why isn’t Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health, rolling back the Biden rules? One possibility is simply his own pro-abortion history, which worried pro-lifers when President Donald Trump nominated him for his position. During his presidential campaign, Kennedy at one point said that women should be able to obtain abortions of their children up to the point when the child is born. He shortly thereafter clarified that he supported the “emerging consensus” that abortion should be unrestricted “up until a certain point,” but that there should be “appropriate restrictions” during the final months of a woman’s pregnancy. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said with regard to abortion, “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’m going to implement his policies.” He also said on mifepristone that Trump “has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it.” Kennedy said that he would implement Trump’s policies when the president took a stand.
A spokesman for HHS, Andrew Nixon, told ABC News Wednesday that the agency is currently conducting a study on adverse effects related to mifepristone in order to “assess whether the FDA’s risk mitigation program continues to provide appropriate protections for women.”
But for some Republican members of Congress, that wasn’t enough. They wanted to know why FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had not testified about the abortion pill at the hearing. As for Kennedy, he has not testified since his confirmation hearing, but Cassidy said Wednesday that he would testify later this year.
During the press conference following the hearing, Sen. James Lankford subtly pointed out the absurdity of HHS changing recommendations on Tylenol during pregnancy while doing nothing to protect pregnant women from the dangerous effects that can result from mifepristone. “This drug, contrary to how the abortionists talk about it, is not as safe as Tylenol…. If you use mifepristone according to label and use Tylenol according to label, there is an 8,000 percent chance difference that you will end up in the emergency room using mifepristone.”
Lankford was very clear about the effect of the FDA’s policies on his state. “What’s happening right now on the national level is abortion drugs are being mailed into my state to go around state law to facilitate the death of children in my state,” he said.
Republican lawmakers urged the Trump administration to simply go back to the FDA policies that were in place prior to the Biden administration’s ideological transformation of them.
“You could fix this by going back to the first Trump policy,” asserted Graham Wednesday. “The pro-life community is not asking too much of a Republican administration and Congress to repeal the Biden policy. I think that’s why we got elected. So it’s time now, folks, to repeal the Biden policy, a Biden policy that undercuts the states’ rights approach.”
He then spoke to Trump directly: “You’ve been a great pro-life president, Mr. President. It’s now time to deal with this issue.”
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