A doctor is warning against the mainstreaming of the abortion pill, proclaiming there is no information on the “long-term consequences” of the pill women are increasingly using to end early-term pregnancies.
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Dr. Donna Harrison, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told CBN’s Faithwire the abortion pill is a “powerful anti-hormone” that blocks women’s bodies from continuing with a healthy pregnancy.
“It blocks the hormone that allows a woman’s body to continue a pregnancy, and when that hormone is blocked, then the woman’s body can’t feed the baby,” Harrison said. “The hormone has effects all over a woman’s body, her brain, her breasts, and we have no idea of the long-term consequences of this powerful anti-hormone, especially in teenagers, where it’s never been tested.”
She explained the abortion pill is two medications. The first, mifepristone, stops the pregnancy from being viable, and the second, misoprostol, causes a woman’s womb to contract and the pregnancy to end. Harrison said the drug causes bleeding, which is a prime area of concern.
“Use of this drug has been associated with massive hemorrhage,” she said. “I’ve reviewed some of the adverse event reports sent to the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], where women have over half of their blood volume — some have lost more than their entire blood volume — and had to have more than their entire blood volume replaced to keep up with the massive hemorrhage.”
“It’s the kind of bleeding one might see in a major motor vehicle accident,” Harrison said.
Watch her explain the purported dangers of the abortion pill:
Women can take the abortion pill regimen around 10 weeks after their last period, though the doctor said the drug is “never safe,” explaining some women could still require surgery after the pill is given.
She said the chances of needing a procedure increase as the gestational timing progresses.
“The further along you are in pregnancy, the higher the risk of needing surgery and the higher the risk of massive hemorrhage,” Harrison said. “A placenta grows as the baby grows, and so there’s more and more blood vessels of the mom’s body that are exposed.”
The doctor’s warning comes as the FDA will allow pharmacies to carry the abortion pill. Due to recent Biden administration changes, the pregnancy-ending pills will no longer need to be received in person by women, with telehealth and mail delivery options on the table.
Yet Harrison is concerned and said she believes some are so “blindly committed to abortion” they simply “refuse to look at the actual effects of this drug.”
“We have many studies that can show abortion drugs or … doing an abortion by drugs is at least four times more risky than doing an abortion by surgery,” she said. “When you’re blindly committed to something, and you refuse to look at the science, then you do all kinds of things that make no medical sense at all.”
This issue will surely become more politically flammable as pro-choice politicians and activists look for ways to expand abortion access in the post-Roe v. Wade era.
But Harrison’s organization and three others have sued the FDA over the abortion pill — an act they hope will stop its sale and prevalence.
Erik Baptist, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a religious liberty law firm, told CBN’s Faithwire the federal government has failed to protect women.
ADF sued the FDA in federal court late last year on behalf of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, and doctors Shaun Jester, Regina Frost-Clark, Tyler Johnson, and George Delgado.
“We brought this lawsuit because the FDA has been entrusted by Congress to protect the American public from dangerous drugs,” Baptist said. “The FDA has failed America’s women and girls by approving dangerous chemical abortion drugs.”
He continued, “And we’re taking the FDA to court because, for decades, it has stonewalled my clients who are trying to challenge and take these drugs off the marketplace.”
Baptist said the FDA approved the drugs in 2000 “against its own rules and regulations,” claiming the agency didn’t study the “real world use” or properly vet the products.
The recent changes making the abortion pill more available are raising serious concerns among people like Harrison and Baptist. One of the issues with allowing women to get the drugs without seeing a doctor is the failure to know the gestational phase of pregnancy.
“She can’t possibly know her risks unless she knows whether she’s seven weeks or 13 weeks,” she said, noting there are other issues, including blood type and ectopic pregnancies, that could further complicate doling out the abortion pill with little oversight.
Watch the full conversation for more.
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