Whenever the topic of baby-ending comes up, I try to put forward a logical argument. One of the premises will always be “the unborn are living and have human DNA”. And for that, I turn to the science of embryology. Basically, I always want to support my case in discussions about social issues with scientific facts. So, in this post, we can add a new study to your quiver for discussing baby-ending.
Here’s the article about the new study, from The Federalist:
In the “largest known study of the abortion pill,” Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson and Director of Data Analysis Jamie Bryan Hall used purchased Medicaid, TRICARE, Medicare, Department of Veterans Affairs, and private medical insurance claim data to determine that 865,727 mifepristone abortion prescriptions for 692,873 women were handed out between 2017 and 2023.
Approximately 10.9 percent of those claims, or 94,605 chemical abortions, involved potentially life-threatening “serious adverse events” such as emergency room visits, hemorrhage, sepsis, infection, and/or follow-up surgeries for the women who had downed the abortion drug within the last 45 days.
That rate, which researchers adjusted to reflect “that some women suffer from adverse events in multiple categories,” is 22 times the FDA’s
Notice how large the study is, this is not like those LGBT parenting studies of like 100 self-selected cases. Also, I like that they use insurance claims, which are hard facts. Some groups who support the pill use much smaller studies to reach opposite conclusions. But their controlled clinical trials are much smaller than this new study.
What’s the point of bringing up this study? Well, people need to be able to calculate the risks of their actions using real numbers. It’s fashionable today to tell young women “follow your heart” and then blame everyone else when that doesn’t “work out” for them. But a much better approach is to let people decide based on facts. It might even cause more women to choose not to have reckless sex at all.
Some women are taking these extreme measures by using telehealth or mail ordering to get this drug. But given these findings, it seems like it would be better for them to see a real healthcare provider to get the facts. And certainly the FDA should be more accurate about the risks.
You might remember that there was a famous case of this in the news recently. Although the secular left tried to blame the death of Amber Nicole Thurman on pro-life laws, she actually died from complications after taking mifepristone and misoprostol to end her pregnancy. What she needed to fix those complications was a non-abortive D&C. The secular left claimed that was illegal in Georgia, but it actually is legal, because it’s not an abortion. Still, these drugs really does affect some women negatively, which is the point.
The Federalist article suggests these fixes to make the situation better:
Changes like reinstating multiple in-person office visits, physician-only prescription, ultrasounds to confirm the gestational stage and rule out ectopic pregnancy, and mandated reporting of complications, the study suggests, could spare suffering women severe and even fatal fallout from the pill.
If you know anyone who is considering this drug, it might be worth pointing them to this study. These days, I see a lot of women having reckless recreational sex with men who have no intention of commiting to them. In fact, many of these women don’t want commitment first. But there are risks to having sex like this. Sometimes, it can cause serious consequences. I think it would be much better if we coached women to choose better men, and to get married first. Then they wouldn’t have to deal with unwanted pregnancies alone – there would be a husband there to help.
