Last December, after an eight month investigation called for by the Biden administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially authorized the telemedical prescription of abortion pills and there being delivered to women’s homes by mail. Implicit in that announcement was an FDA determination that they felt mifepristone and its accompanying prostaglandin misoprostol could be safely and effectively used by women who only met their prescriber online, got their pills by mail, and then managed their abortions at home by themselves. This flies in the face of so much of what we know about the abortion pill and its troubling safety record. National Right to Life has taken that information and produced a new fact sheet “MIFEPRISTONE SAFETY & EFFICACY: Quick Facts about the Abortion Pill,” now available on the “Factsheets & Downloads” section of the www.nrlc.org website. Using data from the FDA and from the abortion industry’s own studies, our fact sheet shows that, however they might be portrayed in the popular media, these abortion are bloody, painful, and dangerous. And that’s when they work as designed. In fact, they fail a lot of the time, leaving the dead or dying baby or other material in the uterus, requiring surgery to stop the bleeding or complete the process. The factsheet points out that there have been at least 26 American deaths and thousands of injuries associated with use of the abortion pill. According to the FDA, women

taking these “safe” pills have suffered hemorrhages, required transfusions, contracted rare and sometimes deadly infections, or had rupturing ectopic pregnancies mistaken for chemical abortions in process. Importantly, the fact sheet makes plain how the FDA’s new policy allowing the home use of pills prescribed by telemedicine and delivered by mail is very likely to increase the risk of failure or complications. If, as the factsheet demonstrates earlier, the risk of complications and failure increases the farther along the woman is in her pregnancy, and if mifepristone does not work in circumstances of ectopic pregnancy (when the child implants outside the uterus), then a failure to adequately screen the patient, to do an in person ultrasound or physical exam, can mean more women past the FDA’s ten week gestational cut off period or missing the signs of ectopic pregnancy. Women having these abortions remotely, at home, may be far from the sort of emergency care they need if and when they begin to hemorrhage or show signs of infection or ectopic pregnancy. Without an in person follow up exam, they may have difficulty knowing whether or not their abortion is complete. Past experience has shown it is possible to bleed, even heavily, and go through all the painful cramping process, and yet not actually abort the baby. (This is one reason why many women have been able to successfully “reverse” their abortions.)

The FDA did not so much deny these risks as ignore them. It has, to date, maintained its certification system. That means requiring that any prescriber attest to an ability to

abortion advocates often unintentionally make the best case against the safety and efficacy of mifepristone. The fact sheet also notes one thing that neither the FDA nor date a woman’s pregnancy and check for signs of an ectopic pregnancy, though it apparently presumes (for the moment) that this can be adequately ascertained by an online or phone interview.

If adequate records are kept, and we eventually find out how many women are given pills past the cutoff date and suffer the consequences, how many ectopic pregnancies are missed, it is hard to see the FDA’s confidence in the safety of telemedical abortion bearing out. Again, the utility and strength of this fact sheet is not that it merely points these important safety and efficacy issues out. An extended note section provides details and documentation for each of these claims, using data from the FDA’s own official documents, labels and reports and from studies put out and performed by abortion pill advocates themselves. It may be surprising, but

abortion advocates like to say a whole about: the psychological trauma faced by a woman encountering the tiny body of her aborted child, seeing his arms, her legs, the child’s face, eyes, and hands. It’s not something mentioned very often in the official documents, but personal accounts appearing in news and magazine articles combined with the basics we know about fetal development make these nightmares all too real for many mifepristone patients. Those cases too, are documented on the fact sheet. National Right to Life hopes that this will not only be a useful tool for activists trying to find out more about these deadly drugs, but also that women considering chemical abortions will take the time to consider the actual facts about the safety and efficacy of these abortifacients. This factsheet is a good place to start.