Four medical associations and four doctors have sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), charging the agency with failing to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of women and girls when the agency authorized the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol for use in the United States.
The plaintiffs also allege that the FDA subsequently eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant women and girls who undergo this dangerous drug regimen.
Chemical abortions now account for over half of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The medical associations and doctors are represented by attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). In their Complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Amarillo Division, the plaintiffs charge the FDA with choosing politics over science, and failing America’s women and girls in the process.
Over the last 30 years, according to the allegations in the suit, the FDA has taken six separate actions that violated its authority as granted by a congressional Act, beginning when President Bill Clinton directed his cabinet in 1993 to legalize chemical abortion drugs in the United States.
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction blocking the FDA’s actions and to declare them illegal and “vacate” them, i.e., officially render them null and void.
The sordid history of the FDA’s involvement includes having to declare “pregnancy” an “illness” in order to come within its delegated authority, the lawsuit alleges. Further, the plaintiffs allege, the FDA “never studied the safety of the drugs as required by law,” and has incrementally removed even the few safeguards its original approval contained.
As most are aware, in 2021 the FDA even approved chemical abortion drugs for delivery through the mail, without an in-person visit with a doctor.
According to the lawsuit, all of the FDA’s actions not only violated federal law, but they put women and girls at risk, including those caught up in human sex trafficking, where victims are provided with the drugs and never get to see an abortionist or doctor who theoretically could sound an alarm with authorities.
ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake explained the basis for the lawsuit in a press release.
“Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit—they end a baby’s life and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother,” Blake said. “The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs.”
Some of the side effects commonly associated with chemical abortion, according to GoodRx.com, include: Cramping, heavy and prolonged bleeding, infection, nausea, weakness, chills, vomiting, headache, diarrhea and dizziness.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute analyzed 17 years of comprehensive Medicaid claims data between 2002 and 2015 and discovered that the rate of abortion pill-related emergency room visits increased over 500% during those years.
Not only does chemical abortion end the life of a preborn baby, it can harm women, as the data shows. For the FDA to put women at risk by the steps it has taken over the years to make these dangerous drugs easily obtainable, and allegedly doing so without legal authority, is the height of folly, and more than sufficient reason for the lawsuit.
Women who have a change of heart after taking the first drug of the two-drug chemical abortion regimen, called mifepristone, should also be aware that there exists a medical concept known as “abortion pill reversal” (APR) as a potential antidote to chemical abortion. APR is credited with saving more than 3,000 babies so far.
Hopefully, this lawsuit will bring an end to this flawed and dangerous experiment on America’s women and girls.
The case is Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Photo from Getty.
