Group opposes pro-life efforts to protect women from dangerous abortion pill
A self-styled watchdog group focused on assailing pro-life organizations recently asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to seize websites involved in publicizing abortion pill reversal (APR) information.
Heartbeat International’s APR website is among those targeted by Campaign for Accountability, a left-wing advocacy group. The group asked the FDA to seize Heartbeat’s APR website. Meanwhile, the group also claimed that chemical abortions are safe for home use and condemned a pro-life coalition’s request for the FDA to seize websites illegally providing chemical abortion drugs.
In its letter to the FDA, the pro-abortion advocacy group also attacked the APR protocol, citing a faulty, admittedly incomplete study conducted by Mitchell Creinin, an abortion provider and paid consultant for Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone—the first drug in the abortion-pill regimen. The incomplete Creinin study was widely misrepresented to disparage APR.
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Campaign for Accountability discloses via its website a pledge to “hold the anti-choice movement accountable” for trying to protect unborn babies. The group also targeted the American Pregnancy Association and Obria Medical Clinics.
Heartbeat dismissed this latest move by activists to preserve the abortion industry’s business. Heartbeat President Jor-El Godsey stated, “Big Abortion simply cannot stomach APR at all. Ideology is the driving force here because the actual science is lining up against them.”
As abortion activists are using the coronavirus to call for the end of protections applicable to the dispensing of chemical abortion drugs, more than 150 members of Congress wrote to the FDA in April in support of continued regulation of chemical abortions. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, chemical abortion already accounted for more than 40% of all U.S. abortions.
Chemical abortions can have serious consequences for women, which they often experience at home, alone.
According to the FDA, chemical abortions are “designed to induce uterine bleeding and cramping.” Beyond those intended effects, numerous women experience weakness, fever/chills, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, and other complications.
Chemical abortion complications can require surgical follow-up procedures or emergency room care in five to seven percent of women, according to a series of reports cited by the Congress members who asked the FDA in April to maintain its regulation of abortion drugs.
Complications of chemical abortion include ruptured ectopic pregnancies, severe hemorrhaging, infection and retained pregnancy tissue, and the rates for complications resulting from chemical abortion are four times higher than for a surgical procedure.
“Big Abortion wants to market this harmful abortion-pill regimen to hundreds of thousands of women without all the current FDA protections in place,” Godsey said. “Once again, the abortion industry shows that its priority is profit, not women’s health.”
But there is hope for women who start the abortion-pill regimen and regret their decision. Abortion pill reversal treatment involves giving a woman progesterone, usually up to 72 hours after she takes mifepristone—the first drug used for a chemical abortion. The treatment is a special application of an FDA-approved drug used for decades to stop miscarriages.
Still, the pro-abortion group challenged the APR protocol, even alleging that use of progesterone – a hormone naturally produced by a pregnant woman to promote a healthy pregnancy – to try to save an unborn baby from a chemical abortion is a misuse of a “new drug.”
Danielle White, general counsel for Heartbeat International, denounced this idea and affirmed the APR treatment and its benefit to women, stating, “Contrary to the Campaign for Accountability's surprising assertion, progesterone is not a ‘new drug.’ Progesterone is a hormone necessary for a healthy pregnancy, and it has been used since the 1950s to prevent threatened miscarriages. No woman should be forced to complete an unwanted abortion. Abortion Pill Reversal care gives women a choice to attempt to stop an in-progress abortion -- a choice that she should be free to make.”
Christa Brown, Heartbeat’s Director of Medical Impact, concurred, stating, “The progesterone used to reverse a chemical abortion works to re-stabilize the pregnancy after a woman takes mifepristone, the first drug used in chemical abortion. The FDA approved this progesterone, and it is used safely and effectively by physicians thousands of time each year to prevent miscarriage and preterm birth.”
Brown also addressed Creinin’s flawed pro-abortion study referenced in the activist group’s letter to the FDA. “The touted emergency interventions in that study actually involved the abortion pill, not the reversal process,” Brown said. “This study actually provided yet another confirmation of what we’ve long known - that the abortion medication mifepristone carries major health risks to a mother. In contrast, no study has shown that the abortion pill reversal process is harmful to women.”
At least 1,000 lives have been saved after pregnant mothers took the first drug in the abortion-pill regimen, changed their minds, and sought help through the Abortion Pill Rescue Network. The Network is managed by Heartbeat International and includes approximately 900 contributing rescue providers and centers.
Brown said, “Yes, you can reverse a chemical abortion. While Big Abortion once counted them as an abortion statistic, there are beautiful children alive and well today thanks to the APR Network.”
“All things in medicine were new at one time, and it’s exciting that women now have this choice available to them when they wish to continue their pregnancies,” Brown added. “Women do not give up the right to options and honest medical care when they seek abortion.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue Network and Pregnancy Help News.
