Cecile Richards claims abortion pill ‘safer than Tylenol.’ She’s very wrong.

Cecile Richards may have stepped down as the CEO of abortion profiteer Planned Parenthood, but it doesn’t appear that she’s going away anytime soon. She recently wrote an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, in which she made a startling claim about the safety of the abortion pill (emphasis added):

When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a strict Arkansas abortion law last month, it effectively made Arkansas the first state in the country to ban medication abortion. As a result, anyone seeking an abortion in Arkansas now has to travel out of state or to Little Rock, where the state’s only surgical abortion provider is located. (Surgical abortion is still legal.)

There is no medical or health reason for this ban on medication abortion. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, non-invasive medication abortion is safe by all measures — safer than Tylenol and Viagra, even. That’s why many women chose it over surgical abortion, which is already one of the safest medical procedures.

There are a lot of problems with these claims. First, the “medication abortion” to which Richards is referring is the abortion pill, or RU-486. The regimen consists of two different medications: mifepristone, which is taken by the mother in office and essentially starves her preborn child of nutrients in the womb, and misoprostol, which is taken by the woman at her home and causes contractions to expel the deceased baby from the womb. Richards may claim that this medication is “safe by all measures,” but the truth is quite different.

1st Trimester Medical Abortion: Abortion Pills

As listed in the video above, there are many risks and adverse effects associated with the abortion pill:

As Live Action News’ Cassy Fiano previously explained, many women may have to “undergo a surgical abortion after the medical abortion or must have another surgical procedure to fix the damage caused. Some women have died, most often from infection or undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies. The long-term effects of the pills used in medication abortion are not yet known.”

A 2000 Oxford University Press study found that the average failure rate of a medication abortion is eight percent. As reported by Live Action News, “An eight percent failure rate means that about one in every 12 chemical abortion attempts will be unsuccessful, which means women will need to be subjected to a surgical abortion, which, of course, also has its own risks.”

At times, the bleeding women experienced after choosing a medication abortion was excessive and frightening, though they were led to believe it would be similar to a heavy period. In describing their experiences with medication abortion, these women described the experience as “emotionally scarring and physically horrible,” “the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life,” “searing, gripping, squeezing pain,” “crushing waves of contractions,” and “like sitting in the middle of a crime scene,” due to the amount of blood loss.

This doesn’t sound “safe by all measures.” It sounds horrific. But since these women are at home experiencing all of these awful things, Planned Parenthood doesn’t have to deal with any possible complications. Instead, these women will likely go to emergency rooms, where it is possible that the ill effects will be reported as something other than abortion complications.

Richards is vastly underplaying the effects of medication abortion. To go so far as to equate its safety to that of a fever reducing medication many of us give to our young children is absurd.

Dr. Donna Harrison of The American Association or Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) told LifeZette, “The claim that medical abortion is safer than Tylenol is just plainly a lie. And what is even more heinous is that medical abortions are being pushed on poor and rural women, who don’t have access to emergency treatments. Those women are much more likely to die as a result.” Harrison noted that the facts are the complete opposite of what Cecile Richards claimed in her op-ed (emphasis added):

“In brief, medical abortions have four times [the] risk of serious complications than surgical abortions,” noted Harrison, citing a study of some 42,000 abortion patients, in which 50 percent of the patients underwent surgical abortions, while the other 50 percent had medical abortions.

The FDA says that at least 22 women have died from using mifepristone, the ingredient found in the abortion medication; thousands of women have been harmed since its release 18 years ago.

How much longer are Planned Parenthood and its friends and former CEO going to continue lying to women for the sake of making a profit? The time is now to end taxpayer funding for this abortion corporation that not only kills 320,000 preborn children every year, but returns sexually abused minors to their abusers and traffickers.

Editor’s Note: If you have taken the first medication of the abortion pill regimen and have changed your mind, visit AbortionPillReversal.com or call 1-877-558-0333.