NASHVILLE (BP) — The number of women suffering from “serious adverse reactions” to the abortion pill mifepristone could be as much as 22 times higher than the rate claimed by the drug’s manufacturer, said a cultural watchdog group in a report published Monday (April 28).
Approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000, mifepristone (also known as RU-486) accounted for 53% of all abortions in the U.S. by 2020. It became available for mail delivery the next year as the FDA sought to lift restrictions deemed unnecessary, and by 2023 the pill was used in 63% of U.S. abortions.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), based in Washington, D.C., alleges that the claim on the drug’s label of “less than 0.5%” of serious adverse effects is severely misrepresented, as it received that figure from 10 clinical trials of 30,966 participants. The EPPC’s testing from “real-world insurance claims” for 865,727 mifepristone abortions brought a serious adverse rate of 10.93%.
“In light of this research, we urge the FDA to reinstate earlier, stronger patient safety protocols and reconsider its approval of mifepristone altogether. Women deserve better than the abortion pill,” read the report.
Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), said he was grateful for the in-depth research accomplished by the EPPC.
“We already knew this drug was harmful, now we have data,” Leatherwood said. “The FDA must immediately move to end this route the predatory abortion industry uses to take life and exploit women.”
The EPPC’s findings demonstrate that the abortion pill was never about women’s health, said Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler on an episode of The Briefing, his daily podcast, this morning (April 29).
“[W]hat we now know is that the abortion rights movement was using a very small sample of outdated information and was pressing politically on the powers that be, especially after the Dobbs decision, to legalize medication abortion, the abortion pill, out of the declaration that the nation faced an abortion and health care emergency,” he said.
“… [O]ver and over again we see the pattern that the declaration that there is a form of emergency leads to political and especially bureaucratic action, sometimes with political acquiescence, sometimes with overt political energy. The point is, this is how such seismic changes happen.”
The FDA should mandate full reporting of mifepristone’s side effects alongside reinstating stronger protocols that were shuttered in 2021, the EEPC report said, due to the 10.93% of women who experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging and other serious conditions within 45 days of the pill’s use.
In fact, the drug’s approval should be reconsidered altogether, the group said.
Mohler further addressed the report’s findings in a column for World.
“This is how the Culture of Death works,” he said. “It kills and it harms. It directs its attack directly on the unborn. It deliberately ignores the ‘harm’ intentionally inflicted on the unborn child and then misrepresents the risk of harm to the mother as well.
“It runs on a high-speed rail of lies and then it piles further lies on top.”
According to figures from the Guttmacher Institute and Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number of abortions in the U.S. declined from 857,475 in 2000 to 638,169 in 2015 before jumping to 874,100 in 2016. After a dip, the numbers surged again to 930,160 in 2020.
Those figures dropped substantially in 2021 and 2022, but several states did not report to the CDC, and so the numbers are not generally accepted as representing the actual number of abortions performed. Over 1 million abortions, the highest number in more than a decade, came in 2023, due largely to increases in telehealth and medication abortions like mifepristone.
Although the Dobbs decision outlawed abortion-on-demand nationally, “the Culture of Death darkly advanced,” said Mohler, who called on President Trump and Congress to act on behalf of women’s health.
“We have just been told how the abortion rights movement outsmarted the cause for life,” he said. “The truth has been slapped in our face. We know what is at stake.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Scott Barkley is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press.)
