Tag: Pro-life

FDA Undermines Women, Unborn Babies With New Abortion Drug Rules

This week the federal Food and Drug Administration unexpectedly changed the rules governing abortion-inducing drugs like RU-486.

In 2000 the FDA issued straightforward instructions governing how doctors were to administer RU-486. However, as we have written before, many abortion clinics have ignored those instructions, choosing instead to administer the drugs in manners different from what the FDA requires.

According to National Right to Life, 14 women have died and thousands of others have been injured by being given RU-486 in a manner inconsistent with the FDA’s protocols.

As a result, states like Arkansas have begun adopting laws requiring abortion clinics to follow the FDA’s protocols when administering abortion drugs like RU-486. That’s what Act 577 of 2015 championed by Rep. Charlene Fite and Senator Linda Collins-Smith did.

In response to these laws, it seems, the FDA has decided to change its protocols to make it easier to dispense RU-486.

Under the old protocols, drugs like RU-486 could be given up to the seventh week of pregnancy, and each round of drugs had to be given to the woman under the supervision of the doctor. Under the new protocols, RU-486 can be given up to the tenth week of pregnancy, and the drugs can be sent home with the woman for her to take on her own.

RU-486 operates in two doses. Each woman is given two sets of drugs that kill and expel her unborn baby; the drugs effectively trigger a miscarriage that many have described as terribly painful and that research indicates is prone to complications.

Under the FDA’s new protocols, a woman who is some two and a half months pregnant will be given abortion-inducing drugs and sent home to take the drugs and miscarry her unborn child. It’s a chilling prospect.

This rule change helps abortion clinics, who now can sell abortion drugs to more women more easily—and later in pregnancy—than they could under the original FDA protocols. However, it hurts women who now are going to be subject to unsafe abortion practices with the FDA’s full approval, and it contributes to the deaths of innocent, unborn children killed in abortion.

The FDA needs to reconsider the course it is charting with this rule change. Coming from an agency charged with protecting public health, this decision is very troubling.

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U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Review AR Abortion Law

Today the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a law Arkansas passed in 2013 preventing most abortions after the twelfth week of pregnancy when a fetal heartbeat is detected.

The law was partially struck by a lower court in 2014; the Attorney General’s office petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse the lower court rulings against the law, but the Supreme Court has decided not to do so.

Specifically, the lower court rulings treated the provisions of the law dealing with informed-consent prior to an abortion as constitutional; however, the portions preventing most abortions after the twelfth week of pregnancy were ruled unconstitutional.

A hearing on the 2013 law at the U.S. Supreme Court would have set the stage for the court to reexamine past cases dealing with abortion, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade—both of which we have written about here.

The U.S. Supreme Court cannot ignore this issue forever. The “viability rule,” which makes it difficult for states to regulate abortion procedures prior to the point an unborn baby becomes “viable,” was established in the Casey decision. It is, as Attorney General Rutledge argued, an arbitrary rule and lacks a firm foundation. As state laws and advances in medical science continue, the “viability rule” will be challenged. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to reevaluate it. For now, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has chosen not to do so.

Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is not related to the two lawsuits Planned Parenthood is involved in against the State of Arkansas.

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