Earlier this week reports surfaced of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) having issued a recall for nearly 80,000 pounds of butter because the packaging lacked the prescribed allergy statement.
The Texas dairy voluntarily conducted the recall of two commonly used two butter products from Kirkland, Costco’s private label brand; both products consisting of 16 oz. packs containing four sticks of sweet cream butter, salted and unsalted, respectively.
The reason for the recall, according to the FDA’s Event Details, was because the “Butter lists cream, but may be missing the Contains Milk statement.”
The recall understandably met with confusion and ridicule, because even while we have some among us taking part in such things as Tide Pod and cinnamon challenges, it seemed ridiculous to many to think there was danger posed by not disclosing milk as part of a butter product. This is because butter, provided it’s real butter, is typically made from milk.
The dairy started the recall October 11 and on November 7 the FDA categorized the recall as Class II, specifically, “a situation in which use of or exposure to a violative product may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences or where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote.” Whether the recall had a classification and at what level for the nearly one-month period prior was not immediately evident, but this is level two of three on the FDA’s recall scale.
Certainly, food allergies exist, and should one eat something to which he or she is allergic, an unpleasant or worse result could be expected. So, let’s take the FDA at face value here and presume noble intent to keep U.S. citizens safe with the recall of 40 tons of butter.
Afterall, the FDA is “responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices; and by ensuring the safety of our nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation.” Side note, the FDA regulates about 78 percent of the U.S. food supply, everything except for meat, poultry, and some egg products.
So, we’re operating under the presumption of the FDA acting in accord with its mission to protect people.
Why, then has the FDA left countless women at risk with lax regulation of chemical abortion pills?
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In the last several years the FDA has removed numerous longtime safeguards for chemical abortion drugs that had been in place since their approval in 2000, including the in-person dispensing requirement, and it abolished the requirement for prescribers to report non-fatal complications, which can include extreme bleeding and injuries that require hospitalization.
Estimates vary but they all indicate that chemical abortions account for a clear majority of all abortions conducted in the U.S. Estimates are all we have because the abortion industry’s reporting is dubious and underreported and chemical abortion has become the all but unregulated abortion frontier, the pills even available through the mail and at retail pharmacies. Many illicit abortion pill dealers also operate openly online without appropriate regulation or accountability. The percentage of chemical abortions is expected to continue to grow with the drugs becoming so easy to access.
Just going with stats from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, approximately 642,700 chemical abortions took place within the U.S. health care system in 2023. Guttmacher said there were 1,026,690 abortions in the health care system that year and chemical abortions accounted for 63% of them. So even on the low-end, well over a half-million U.S. women would be subject to FDA oversight of chemical abortion drugs each year.
The general risks that come with chemical abortion drugs, according to the Mayo Clinic, are incomplete abortion, ongoing pregnancy, heavy and prolonged bleeding, infection, fever, and digestive symptoms such as upset stomach.
Claims that chemical, or medical abortion, is safe abound, but they typically generate from entities that support or benefit from abortion and they are dutifully passed along in the willing news media.
Life-affirming sources with no material benefit from abortion revenue, though, err on the side of safety for women, and continually warn against the potential dangers of chemical abortion drugs.
Figures from the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) illustrate the physical risks:
• Chemical abortion has a complication rate four times that of surgical abortion, and as many as one in five women will suffer a complication. Three to seven out of every hundred women who choose chemical abortion early in pregnancy will need follow-up care to finish the abortion, with as many as 7-10% needing follow-up care in the first trimester after 63 days of pregnancy and up to 39% requiring surgery if the regimen is accidentally taken in the second trimester.
• As many as 15% of women will experience hemorrhage, and 2% will have an infection. The risk of incomplete abortion and infection increases with increasing gestational age.
• Chemical abortion drugs are increasingly likely to send women to the emergency room (ER): in a study of the Medicaid population in states that fund abortion for low-income women, the rate of chemical abortion-related emergency room visits increased over 500% between 2002-2015.
• Chemical abortions are over 50% more likely than surgical abortions to result in an ER visit within 30 days, with one woman experiencing an abortion-related ER visit for every 20 chemical abortions.
• Some abortion advocates encourage women to lie to their doctors if they need urgent care following a chemical abortion and to say they are having a miscarriage. However, if a chemical abortion is miscoded as a miscarriage in the ER (which occurred 60% of the time in one study), the woman is at significantly greater risk of needing multiple hospitalizations and follow-up surgery.
Without an in-person doctor visit the pregnant woman cannot be assessed for gestational age, ectopic pregnancy, or other serious conditions.
Chemical abortion drugs are currently approved in the U.S. through 10 weeks of pregnancy. Prescribing them later in pregnancy heightens the risk for women. Undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy puts women at risk of severe bleeding and death. And if an Rh-negative woman is not diagnosed and given Rhogam at the time of her chemical abortion, CLI reports, she could experience isoimmunization, which would cause serious risks to her future pregnancies.
Additionally, without proper follow-up care women cannot be adequately assessed for life-threatening conditions and serious complications following a chemical abortion.
The FDA’s removal of the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion pills also opens the door for myriad risks of traffickers and abusers obtaining the abortion drugs and either forcing them on women or giving them to women without their knowledge and consent.
The federal agency’s own data shows that at least 32 women have died from chemical abortion pills between the drugs' approval in 2000 and 2022. If that number seems easily dismissible as a risk factor with so many chemical abortions occurring annually, I would ask, how many women’s deaths are too many?
None of this touches on the psychological and emotional effects of delivering your child at home with no medical oversight.
The FDA’s regulations for chemical abortion drugs leave significant and unacceptable gaps in protections for pregnant women.
But by all means, pull the Costco butter.
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