Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Part I

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The Truth About the Abortion Pill: The Deadly Danger and Effects of the Abortion Pill Revealed in New Study by the EPPC

The pill changed just about everything. Now, I’m assuming that when you hear me refer to the pill, you’re thinking about the contraceptive pill, the birth control pill. The development of oral contraceptives did indeed change the entire moral landscape in the United States, and as we now know, it has also led to vast changes in the nation’s birth rate. The sexual revolution, as we know it would’ve been impossible without the development of the pill. And as I often want to remind Christians, that did not come out of a neutral context. It came out of a deliberate context to separate sex and reproduction and eventually sex from marriage. But now, when we say the pill changed everything, we’re not just talking about one pill, we’re talking about two pills.

It is not just the contraceptive pill, the birth control pill that changed everything. In more recent times, it is the abortion pill. Now, there are two pills that have radically aided the sexual revolution, radically aided the vast changes in America’s moral landscape and vast damages when it comes to the United States. Not just moral effects, but especially when it comes to the second of these pills, the abortion pill, the evidence is overwhelming, but it has largely been hidden. All that change just yesterday with the release of a major report by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, EPPC, that’s a major Washington think tank, and the title of the report basically says that all the “Abortion Pill Harms Women.” And then you have the revelation that insurance data reveals that when you’re talking about serious adverse events connected to the use of the abortion pill, in particular mifepristone, it now includes one in 10 patients who will experience a serious adverse event.

Now, the important thing to recognize here is that the abortion rights movement and the industry pushing for not only the legalization but the standardization of the use of now medication abortion as it is known, a chemical abortion by means of an abortion pill, and even at times a series of pills. The fact is that behind that has been the claim that it is absolutely safe. And as a matter of fact, some of the propaganda for the abortion pill says that complications are less likely with the abortion pill, mifepristone, than even with an over the counter pain reliever such as Tylenol. So is it true or is it false? Well, what we now know is that the abortion rights movement was using a very small sample of outdated information and was pressing politically on the powers that be, especially after the Dobbs decision, to legalize medication abortion, the abortion pill, out of the declaration that the nation faced an abortion and healthcare emergency.

Now, over and over again, we see the pattern that the declaration, that there is a form of emergency leads to political and especially bureaucratic action, sometimes with political acquiescence, sometimes with overt political energy. The point is, this is how such seismic changes happen, and I want to take a little closer look at this report. It’s by Jamie Bryan Hall, director of Data Analysis, and it’s also released by Ryan T. Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a very well-known bioethicist and “The Abortion Pill Harms Women” is the title. And that really does state the case because over against the propaganda coming from the abortion rights movement and those who are directly associated with the pill, the claim is that it is basically harmless without serious medical risk. But now consider these data points, first, about 10.93% of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging or other serious adverse events within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.

So now we’re not talking about a marginal risk, and now we’re talking about just shy of 11% of all the women who have used the pill, they’ve experienced at least one of these complications, very serious complications. The summary from the report goes on to state, “The real world rate of serious adverse events following a mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure ‘of less than 0.5%’.” That’s in quotation marks in clinical trials reported on the drug label. Now, let me just stop here for a moment. I know the fact is that the vast majority of Americans hardly read past the initial instructions of how often and for how long to take the medication. I think most of us know that there is available probably in the packaging, and if not so, we’re directed to sources online that will give us voluminous, and I do mean voluminous overwhelming information and all that in the name of having an informed consent on the part of the consumer.

The reality is it’s more basically just legal coverage from the manufacturer and the distributor. Those involved in the pill, they can say that they disclosed any number of risk complications, etc. But when it comes to the abortion pill, mifepristone, we know just how political this is. It always has been from the very beginning, and we know that in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision reversing Roe in 2022, there was an immediate rush with political energy coming from the abortion rights movement to legalize, standardize, and popularize the use of the abortion pill. Thus, basically doing a go-around when it comes to the Roe v. Wade decision, now that it is reversed by Dobbs, the sense that there is no 50 state guaranteed national federal right to an abortion.

Now that the questions return to the states, you see the abortion rights movement saying, “Let’s just outsmart the pro-life movement and let’s outsmart state legislators and pro-life states. Let’s outsmart everybody by simply turning the question of abortion into the question of a pill.” And even though you may have red states and blue states, you may have pro-abortion states and pro-life states, you may have restrictions on abortion in many states. You know what? The pill will get through, and that is actually what is taking place. This report makes that very, very clear. The report calls upon the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, to, “Immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects. The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and based on objective safety criteria reconsider its approval altogether.” What kind of numbers are we talking about here? Well, the manufacturer and the FDA according to this report, looked at only 10 clinical trials.

And in those 10 clinical trials, only about 30,966 participants were involved. The data from this analysis produced by the EPPC looks at 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions between the years of 2017 and 2023. And what they’re finding is that the risk in reality as reported in these certifiable reports, it is about 22 times higher than what was admitted by the proponents of the abortion pill and also its manufacturers in the data presented to the Food and Drug Administration. The full text of the report goes into the background of mifepristone, the abortion pill. And the report points out that even though the pill was developed by a French pharmaceutical company, it was quickly very much the aim of the American pro-abortion movement to gain access to the pill and make its use standard. And in order to do that, it was going to have to prove two things in terms of the FDA protocols.

Two things: efficacy and safety. Now horrifyingly enough, the efficacy is pretty clear. It is a very efficacious, efficient killer of the unborn human being. It is indeed a very effective early term abortifacient. Hold that thought for a moment because the other question is just how long into a pregnancy is this pill being used? In terms of safety, this is the main issue that this report addresses pointing out that the companies and those who were the advocates for the use of the pill, they were presenting data which was extremely limited, already out of date, and misrepresentative, when it comes to the actual dangers to women using these pills. When the US FDA did approve some limited use of the drug, there were certain protocols put into place. For example, the drug could only be prescribed by physicians who indicate they’d read and understood the prescribing information.

The drug could only be administered in a clinical context in a medical office or hospital under the supervision of a physician. And key to this was assessing the “gestational age of an embryo” and also the ability “to diagnose ectopic pregnancies.” But the report then tells us this crucial part of the history, “During the Obama and Biden administrations, the FDA chipped away at these initial safeguards risking women’s health in order to increase access to abortion.” Under the current risk evaluation and mitigation strategy in effect since 2023, the report states, I’m quoting here, “A mifepristone abortion now requires as little as one telehealth visit with any approved healthcare provider.” Okay, now just listen to this, telehealth. So now we’re talking about internet-based, you’re talking about distance prescription after distance diagnosis of the use of this abortion pill, and that’s what’s absolutely crucial to the pro-abortion movement strategy here because that’s a way of going around the states.

And so now we’re looking at certain states where there’s even legal protection and encouragement for providers of these services and these pills to make them available to women in all 50 states regardless of the laws restricting abortion in those states. The other thing is that we are now told that when you look at the total number of abortions, even the proponents of the abortion pill are now claiming that the vast majority of abortions in the United States right now are by means of the pill, not by means of surgical abortion as in an abortion clinic. Under the changes made during the Obama and Biden administrations, another was that a woman “may self-administer drugs obtained from a mail order pharmacy, and three, the prescriber need not report any adverse events unless he or she knows that a patient has died.” Let’s just hear that again. The FDA approved new protocols under pressure from the Obama and Biden administrations to lessen the restrictions, to let go of many of the restrictions placed upon the abortion pill.

And when the prescribers know, even know that there’s an adverse event, they don’t have to report it unless the patient dies. 

Part II

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Mifepristone, the Work-Around of the Culture of Death: The Abortion Pill is Now the Single Most Effective Weapon of the Culture of Death

The EPPC report goes on to cite that about two-thirds of all abortions in the United States right now are by means of the pill. And this is such a moral game changer, and I think many Christians, many people deeply involved and even long-term involved in the pro-life movement, I think we fail to understand just how the landscape has been shifted. Some of the data are actually hard to get a hold of. So one of the advances in terms of our moral understanding of what’s going on here is that you have an organization like EPPC, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, put out a study of this kind of credibility with these kinds of numbers. And for one thing, it’s a wake-up call to pro-life Americans that the pro-abortion movement has done a workaround around not only the Dobbs decision, but basically around Roe v. Wade.

What you have here is evidence of the fact that abortion is probably now more accessible to women than it was before Roe v. Wade was reversed in 2022. While trying to get ahead, we may actually be further behind. Now theologically, we should anticipate that this might be so because the culture of death is wholly opposed to the gospel of life and the culture of death will do anything it can to advance its purposes, even at the expense of women’s health and of course at the expense of unborn human life. And we understand how desperately intense this battle has been over the years. And so even as the pro-life movement rightly celebrated the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision, horrifying decision handed down in 1973, its reversal in 2022 came as a result of decades, almost a half century, of intense pro-life activism, very hard work on the part of grassroots supporters of unborn life, by the efforts of many conservative religious denominations on the part of courageous legislators, governors, senators, representatives, and yes, judges and justices, yes.

But all of that, may basically now be in a changed landscape in which an abortion pill turns out to be the way most abortions are conducted. Then that little pill is the way abortion becomes available even when legislators and politicians, judges, and all the rest have done their very best according to the constitution and the law to put defenses and protections for unborn life and for the life and for the health of women into the law. This is a go around that shows you just how the culture of death works.

Part III

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The Culture of Death Gloats: Historian Brags About How Abortion Advocates Expanded Abortion Even After the Fall of Roe v. Wade

But I want to take this just a little bit further because it’s not only a demonstration of how the culture of death works, it’s also a revelation of how the culture of death gloats. I want to point you to a piece that ran just a matter of days ago at Washington Monthly. That’s pretty much inside baseball, political journal, has a lot of influence.

Washington Monthly has run an article by Carrie N. Baker. She is the professor of American studies and chair of the program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She’s the author of a book entitled Abortion Pills: US History and Politics. The piece that she contributed to Washington Monthly is a demonstration of the culture of death, not only smiling its dark smile, but gloating. Here’s the headline, “How Reproductive Freedom Advocates Outsmarted the Anti-Abortion Movement.” And in some her argument as to how the pro-abortion advocates outsmarted, that’s her word, it’s at least the word in the headline, outsmarted the pro-life movement, it comes down to the pill, the abortion pill. That’s how it was done. And the increase in abortion is something that is here celebrated.

The second paragraph of this article begins this way, “While 930,160 women obtained abortions through the medical system in 2020, that number grew to 1,033,740 in 2023, the first time in more than a decade,” she writes that the number of abortions exceeded 1 million. She says in 2024, the number rose to 1,038,000, a 4% increase over 2023. And she points out that this is true even in a pro-life state like Mississippi. She says, “In Mississippi, the state that brought us Dobbs, the case overturning Roe v. Wade, the number of those obtaining abortions from inside the medical system climbed from 2,850 to 2020, that’s before Dobbs, to 3,305 in 2023. After Dobbs, a 16% increase,” she writes, in just three years, “These numbers do not include abortions occurring outside the medical system estimated to be more than 100,000 since 2022.”

She points to the development and availability of Telehealth abortion during especially the conditions of the pandemic and all kinds of misbehavior, all kinds of horrible policy was made during the pandemic and in what was declared to be a medical emergency, at least a part of that medical emergency was the claim that because of the restrictions under COVID, the government should lessen restrictions on the abortion pill among other things, by the way.

And it did so. And of course, on the other side of it, you know how these things work, it stays pretty much the same or gets worse. In this case, it gets worse. She writes, and I quote, “The primary reasons for the expansion of abortion access, despite state bans, are the advent of telehealth abortion during the pandemic and the development of community support networks that provide free abortion pills to individuals living in restrictive states.” You see the go around? They’re not hiding this. They’re actually bragging about it. She goes on to state this, “Inside the medical system, women in states with bans are accessing telehealth abortion from providers in eight states, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.” Now get this, “That have telehealth provider shield laws allowing clinicians to serve those seeking abortions no matter where in the US they reside.”

And then she points to these advocacy organizations that are not only helping to make it available, but who are also paying for it. There’s another open acknowledgement in this article. “Many seeking abortions are now obtaining pills outside of the medical system from community support networks.” Again, that tells you exactly what is going on, and this is not some right-wing claim about what the pro-abortion movement is doing. This is a statement by that movement crowing about how effective their efforts to go around restrictions on abortion have now been. And they’re so deadly effective simply because of the pill and also because of the political agenda behind the pill, complicity by the Food and Drug Administration, and the active intervention of liberal states with these shield laws preventing persons from being prosecuted for let’s say by telehealth, treating a woman in a state that has restrictive laws on abortion and thus just going around the right and power of that state to restrict abortion.

And then of course, even with the addition of organizations willing basically to pay for it and make it free, death by mail, death by mouth, death basically free. 

It’s also instrumental to the argument made by the abortion rights advocates, and I’m going to put Professor Baker at the top of that list with this article. She makes this claim, “These new avenues to abortion both inside and outside of the medical system work so well because the two medications used for abortion, mifepristone and misoprostol, are 97.4% effective and safer than Tylenol.” Well, there it is, safer than Tylenol. And look at the number, 97.4% effective, except it’s not. And the EPP study released yesterday makes very clear that the actual risk is a multiple of that. And we’re talking about very serious medical complications. Most of them related one way or another to the difficulty of expelling the tissue of the unborn human being in the womb and thus some form of sepsis, which can be a very, very dangerous situation for a woman indeed.

Professor Baker’s article ends by citing Elisa Wells, the co-founder and co-director of one of the programs, saying, “Abortion pills are here to stay. Community distribution networks and overseas providers will remain intact and abortion pills will continue to come into the country.” So there you see, the culture of death is not just the national organizations or others trying to overcome the restrictions adopted by some states. It is also the effort to go all the way around even national borders in terms of access to the abortion pill. It shows you that the culture of death just never rests. It is never satisfied. It’s going to press on according to its agenda and it’s going to crow about it. That’s the amazing thing. This is not something being done out of sight and hidden. This is now being bragged about, boasted about by the pro-abortion movement. I mentioned Professor Baker’s article.

I also have her book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics. And it was published just last year by Amherst College Press. And this is how she concludes the book, “Surprisingly, states did not criminalize self-managed abortion in the first two years after Dobbs, and no one using pills in early pregnancy had been arrested or prosecuted as of August of 2024.” So this tells you again, it’s not only the fact that the pro-abortion movement was pressing for the availability of the pill, taking advantage of the context of COVID-19 and the pandemic to press for lessened restrictions using outdated information, just pressing that case. It’s not just that they did that. It’s also the case that the pro-life movement and the pro-life legislators were behind the ball, at least in part in understanding what was going on and the states have not been effective at restricting the availability of these pills.

But then this sentence is how she ends the entire book. “The future was uncertain, but advocates had made safe abortion much more widely available than before Roe, and in some respects, even during Roe.” Let that sink in for a moment. She’s making the claim that not only was this a go-around after the Dobbs decision, it was so effective a go-around for the culture of death that abortion now arguably is more widely available than it was even under the protections of Roe. Christians need to understand, first of all, what is going on here. The culture of death is so effective in pressing for its aims by stealth and using every opportunity. I think the opening acknowledgement here that the pandemic provided such an opportunity, it wasn’t really completely understood when it happened. In retrospect, that’s exactly what they were doing. They seized that opportunity, but it also requires the complicity of others, and that includes most importantly, regulators.

And at the center of that concern is the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. And with the release of this kind of information, we need political action. We need concerted political action. We need a remedy. We need pressure on the FDA, and the FDA needs a lot of pressure to force it to reconsider what this evidence indicates was a very ill-advised decision to lessen the restrictions on the abortion pill and the political context is now far better understood. The numbers are going to have to be confronted. The FDA needs to answer for this. 

Part IV

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Senator Calls Out the FDA – And Christians and Conservatives Need to Put Pressure on the Trump Administration About the Abortion Pill

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, tweeted yesterday, “I’m calling on the FDA to reinstate safety regulations on the chemical abortion drug immediately. New data out today show a massive number of severe medical side effects.” A massive number, yes, of severe medical side effects. It’s the right thing to call upon the FDA to reinstate safety regulations on the drug.

But we as Christians understand that safety is this and more that physical safety is only a part of safety. And we also understand that the physical safety of the mother is only part of the equation when you also have the life of the unborn child. And in this case, the life of the mother is the prior life that is to be protected, but not at the expense of the child and not with the intention of bringing about the termination of the pregnancy, not with any intention to bring about the death of the unborn life. But it’s also true that when you think about safety in this case is not just the culture of death wants to ignore, and even dismiss the very existence of the unborn person in the womb, it is also true that it defines safety solely in terms of a medical term, but it also reduces safety to mere physical safety.

And in that case, we already know it’s a huge fail, massive fail, dishonest fail, incompetent fail when it comes to government supervision. But it’s also, we know theologically and biblically, a failure to limit safety to simply medical concerns. It is that of course, but safety has to be expanded to moral realities. It’s not just a medical concern, it is a moral concern. And as Christians, we understand that the one can never be severed from the other.