The court unanimously ruled Thursday that the pro-life doctors (Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine) who filed the lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of mifepristone – and the agency's subsequent actions to ease access to it, including via mail – had no legal standing to do so.
Dr. Brian Clowes, director of education and research at Human Life International, says that means the harmful drug will continue sending about 1 in 22 women to hospital emergency rooms, some with life-threatening complications.
According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, approximately 63% of all abortions are done using chemical abortion methods. Mifepristone is used in combination with misoprostol. The former causes the death of the child, and the latter causes powerful, painful contractions to expel the dead or dying baby.
"The number-one threat here is if someone who's got an ectopic pregnancy [takes] one of these pills, and they feel a lot of pain, what's actually happening is that the ectopic pregnancy is rupturing," Clowes explains. "We're going to start seeing women dying because they thought the pain was from the abortion pill."
Though a sonogram would detect such a pregnancy, likely saving the life of the mother, the FDA does not require that before the drug is administered.
"Taking one of these abortion pills, or even the morning-after pill, it's like nuking the body with a 50 times more powerful dose of hormones," the researcher explains. "I imagine in 10 or 15 years we're going to see a massive wave of all kinds of exotic cancers and other diseases suddenly breaking out."
Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is disappointed the court ignored those documented and possible dangers.
"They're supposed to be out there about finding drugs that heal and cure and help patients, not ones that put human beings to death like these abortion drugs do," he notes. "The FDA itself has admitted that there've been at least 32 deaths associated with use of this, and there've been thousands of different women who've suffered from episodes of hemorrhage, significant bleeding. They've had infections – some of them that have been deadly. They've had situations where they had ectopic pregnancies that went undetected that ruptured."
"They've failed in so many aspects of this," O'Bannon adds.
Clowes asserts, though, that all is not lost; while the pill remains legal, efforts to reinstate safety rules will continue through the courts and other avenues. In O'Bannon's words, this was simply not the case "that's going to finally bring the FDA to account."
Pro-lifers plan to continue educating the public and pressing for changes to the FDA's lax rules.
