FDA passes Mifeprex changes, reducing cost for abortions despite risk to women

The Food and Drug Association (FDA) changed the regimen for mifepristone (Mifeprex), significantly reducing the obstacles, burden, and cost to abortionists. The move includes approval of new labeling for the abortion drug, prompting Eric Scheidler, Executive Director of the Pro-Life Action League, to comment on the impact to as the victims, guidance of physician monitoring, increase the possibility of abortion pill failure and the potential for deadly complications.

Participants in the “March for life” walk along Concord Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee, photo Michael Stansberry via wikimedia commons

The FDA approved RU-486 in 2000 after enacting “accelerated approval regulations,” usually used to speed up the introduction of a drug curing a major disease.

Its guidelines required doctors to administer 600 mg of mifepristone, which causes the newly implanted child to detach from the mother’s uterine wall. The mother then takes 400 mcg of misoprostol, which causes contractions that expel the baby from her womb.

But abortionists found that prescribing a lower dose of the expensive mifepristone and increasing misoprostol saved approximately $200 per abortion.

The National Abortion Federation stated that, by 2008, only four percent of abortion facilities followed the FDA’s guidelines for medication abortion.

That caused the number of chemical abortions to surge from six percent in 2001 to nearly one-quarter of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

But the new regimen carried a price. National Right to Life‘s Director of Education and Research Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., said today’s decision came “despite a record of at least 14 known deaths, and thousands of women suffering.”

By 2011, there had been 2,207 cases of severe “adverse events,” including hemorrhaging, blood loss requiring transfusions, serious infection, and deaths.

Scheidler released the following statement on the new FDA protocols on mifepristone:

We all agree that the FDA should be looking out for the best interests of American health care consumers, but in this case, they’re serving the interests of the abortion industry and Danco Laboratories, the sole provider of mifepristone in the U.S. At least eight deaths have been documented of women using mifepristol for abortion, all of them using the off-label protocol that the FDA has just approved.

While this change is unlikely to impact abortion rates, it will improve the bottom line for abortion providers, who charge as much for a medical abortion as for a surgical one, despite the cost being much lower to them. And should the abortion pill fail, as often happens, abortion providers profit again with a backup surgical abortion.

Medical abortion is billed by the abortion industry as safe and easy, but typically involves excruciating cramps and excessive bleeding, sometimes for days, and all while a woman is on her own. The abortion itself happens far from the abortionist’s office: at home, at school, at work or out at the mall. And in the end, an innocent human life has been destroyed in its first weeks of life.

With this deplorable decision, the FDA has abdicated its responsibility to safeguard women’s health and defend human life.