Opinion | Dr. Ingrid Skop | Apr 16, 2024 | 3:16PM | Washington, DC
Sometimes pro-abortion journalists inadvertently confirm points that pro-life advocates have been making for years.
Surprisingly, @CAKitchener from the @WashingtonPost painted a stark picture of the traumatizing reality of abortion drugs.
Read the full article at Life News
One woman, Angel, wanted to talk to a doctor but had been given the pills without medical supervision. After taking the pills, her body was "racked by some of the worst pain she could remember."
Another, a 15-year-old, "passed a fetus larger than she'd expected." Unable to flush the baby down the toilet, she asked an abortion hotline operator about throwing it away.
The operator advised her "not to tell anybody."
Yet another, Briana, took the pills at least five weeks beyond the FDA's 10 week limit. She described a "pop," a "gush of warm liquid," and "felt a mass larger than her palm drop into the toilet."
She saw bloody umbilical cord dangling between her legs. And she described her aborted child: she could see a head, and she remembered "the legs looked long."
"I felt like a monster," she said.
She was lucky, as large records-linkage studies show that 38.5% of women using abortion drugs in the second trimester will require surgery.
I have repeatedly been called a liar for warning of this possibility.
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Doctors disagreed about whether a woman in this situation should seek emergency care, claiming that "the women could face prosecution or mistreatment if she went to the hospital."
This is simply fear and misinformation, because no pro-life law will prosecute these women.
One in twenty of the women Aid Access (where Briana ordered the drugs) sends abortion drugs to are beyond 11 weeks of pregnancy.
Sugarcoating the situation by repeating abortion industry talking points won't work.
The reality is most drug-induced abortions in the U.S. are now provided without medical oversight through a deregulated process approved by the FDA.
Prior to Roe, abortion advocates stated that "self-managed abortion was dangerous."
Today "self-managed abortion" is encouraged.
Where abortion advocates once claimed abortion "should be safe, legal and rare", this article documents that in states where it is illegal, abortion advocates are willing to provide abortion drugs in unsafe conditions, in order to keep it common.
The experience – confusing, scary and deeply traumatic – occurs throughout the country, in pro-abortion as well as pro-life states, as medical supervision of abortion drugs has been removed across the country.
The article places the blame on pro-life states, which have passed laws to protect women and their children.
What it fails to acknowledge: the nearly exponential increase in drug-induced abortions year-by-year since FDA approval in 2000.
Despite the fact that complications from abortion drugs are four times more common than complications following surgical abortion, women have been preferentially directed toward abortion drugs for decades for reasons that benefit the abortion industry.
The abortion industry has long experienced staffing shortages because few obstetricians are willing to end the life of one of their patients by providing a surgical abortion.
For them, abortion drugs are the "perfect" solution.
For women, the pattern of deregulation has only magnified the risks.
It is the FDA's own actions in 2021, not the overturn of Roe in 2022, that generated nightmares like Angel, Briana, and the unnamed 15-year-old experienced.
And there is no way to verify who is ordering the drugs. Is it a coercive partner, incestuous abuser or sex trafficker?
Do women know the risks? The FDA fails to mandate complication reporting, so how can they?
Do women know the alternatives, that there are nearly 3000 pregnancy resource centers in the U.S. providing emotional and material support to women who want to give birth to their children?
The FDA's own data reveals that approximately one in twenty-five women taking these abortion drugs will be treated in an emergency room for concerns related to the abortion.
A thoughtful read of the Washington Post article should alert all who care about women, pro-abortion and pro-life alike, to the horrifying reality of abortion drugs in our country.
Surely, we can all agree that women deserve better than this.
How has the desire by some to end every unintentionally conceived human life caused us to turn our faces away from the women who are the collateral damage?
LifeNews Note: Ingrid Skop, M.D., FACOG, is vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute.