Wall Street Journal, 01.04.2023, Health, Liz Essley Whyte
The Food and Drug Administration expanded access to a drug that induces abortion, allowing brick-and-mortar pharmacies to dispense the pills for the first time.
Under the changes the agency issued Tuesday, any pharmacy can complete and sign a short form to become certified to provide the so-called abortion pill.
Here is a quick refresher:
Abortion pill access increased significantly during the pandemic as the FDA allowed a limited number of Tele-Health mail-order pharmacies to process abortion pills (mifepristone/misoprostol) requests.
Before this, patients had to go to a doctor and get a prescription.
Aid Access, a European nonprofit, said it receives about 4,000 requests for abortion pills a month from the U.S. They send them to all states, regardless of abortion bans.
Twelve states ban abortion throughout pregnancy, and 18 require a physician to be physically present with a patient to prescribe abortion pills. It is well known that many mail-order pharmacies are ignoring these laws.
This pill is certified by the FDA as safe(?) and effective through ten weeks.
The Guttmacher Institute of Planned Parenthood is the source of essential trend data on Abortions - their latest report on 2020 was just released and observed:
In 2020, 930,160 abortions were provided in clinical settings, an 8% increase from 2017.
Slightly more than one in five pregnancies, 20.6%, ended in abortion in 2020, up from 18.4% in 2017
Medication abortion accounted for more than half of all US abortions for the first time, compared with 39% in 2017.
Guttmacher had to estimate abortions for about 12 % of the facilities due to incomplete data. In some states, this was worse; New Jersey had 40% of abortions estimated.
What is missing is the mail-order (outside clinical settings where all of the survey data is received from) abortion pill orders that may or may not be legal - and even if we had them, you would need to assume that some of them were not used.
As this trend towards medication abortion continues, any data on the number/demographics of abortions in the US will be suspect. Your view on when life begins will decide whether the increased early medication abortions (supposedly before viability of 12-15 weeks) is an improvement. Whatever you think, the fight has moved from public clinics to private homes. Truth…
Whenever I hear the words, The Pill, my age takes me back to the 70s when it meant preconception prevention, preventing the creation of a life. Now it means AFTER conception, the actual TAKING of a life. Since they are the same or very similar tools, is there a difference? Food for thought.
Whenever I hear the words, The Pill, my age takes me back to the 70s when it meant preconception prevention, preventing the creation of a life. Now it means AFTER conception, the actual TAKING of a life. Since they are the same or very similar tools, is there a difference? Food for thought.
Sounds like we now throw the babies out with the bathwater.
Galatians 6:7 (NKJV)
Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap