20 state AGs claim abortion pill is safe as FDA prepares to conduct review

As new studies and analyses reveal a higher serious adverse events rate from the abortion pill than what is stated by the FDA, 20 state attorneys general have issued a joint statement claiming it is safe, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it plans to review the drug.

Key Takeaways:

• 20 attorneys general have issued a joint statement claiming the abortion pill is safe and vowing to protect it.

• The statement is a response to the FDA's review of the drug mifepristone, which was approved 25 years ago in the U.S.

• The safety of mifepristone has been called into question after studies showed that it is likely not as safe as previously claimed.

• Women have been instructed by abortionists to lie when they go to the ER for an abortion pill related complication, telling doctors they are suffering from a miscarriage instead.

The Details:

Twenty attorneys general, who are not medical professionals, have claimed that mifepristone has a proven safety record. However, the abortion industry has been covering up the truth about the physical risks of the drug for decades.

"For more than 25 years, mifepristone has been used safely and effectively in the United States and globally," they said in a statement. "It is currently the most common method for early-term abortion care in the United States and is the standard of care for managing early miscarriage."

The statement comes after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the FDA will review the safety of the abortion pill. He argued that the Biden administration 'twisted' data on the drug.

The attorneys general claimed that "medical decisions should be left between patients, their families, and their providers — and they should be guided by science, not political agendas."

They vowed to "take action to protect" the drug if "access to mifepristone is challenged."

Reality Check:

While the abortion industry claims that the abortion pill is safe, citing a supposed low rate of serious complications requiring hospitalizations, abortionists have actually been hiding the true rate of adverse reactions to mifepristone.

Shortly after mifepristone was first approved under the Clinton administration in 2000, a woman died after taking it; this was the day before the terrorist attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. One abortion industry insider said that 9/11 essentially "saved" the abortion pill by hiding the headline of the woman's death.

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But other than deaths, studies and analyses point to a drastic underreporting of complications. Women who take the abortion pill are frequently instructed to visit an ER if they experience a complication, and are told to lie to ER staff, claiming it was due to a miscarriage. Though this has been emphasized as a way to maintain women's privacy or prevent criminal charges (even though no state currently prosecutes women for obtaining abortions), in reality, this has skewed the safety data on mifepristone, while making pregnancy and miscarriage appear more dangerous. For 25 years, countless women have told ER doctors that they were suffering natural miscarriages when in reality, they were suffering complications of the abortion pill. This means that those complications were never reported as abortion pill complications, making the drug appear far safer than it actually is.

Multiple studies have shown that the serious adverse events rate is much higher than the FDA stated on the mifepristone label. An analysis from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that nearly 11% of women (10.93%) experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other serious or life-threatening adverse events following a mifepristone abortion. This means one in ten women experience at least one serious complication from taking mifepristone within 45 days — 22 times higher than the “less than 0.5 percent” serious adverse events rate reported by the FDA on the mifepristone label, according to this study. Additionally, a recent study out of Ireland revealed that 12% of women who took mifepristone experienced complications serious enough to visit the ER.

Abortion advocates have long claimed that mifepristone is 'safer than Tylenol,' however, another study — this one from the pro-abortion group Gynuity — found that  6% of women who took the abortion pill required a visit to the ER or urgent care for complications. That’s 107 times greater than the rate for acetaminophen/Tylenol (.056%) based on this analysis, and 33 times greater than the rate for penicillin (0.18%) based on this analysis.