With abortion bans on the books in a dozen states and six-week “heartbeat” bills in four, the abortion industry is increasingly focused on putting all of its eggs in one basket: Mifepristone. In 2023, the abortion pill accounted for 63% of abortions, and organizations like Planned Parenthood push the lie that medication abortion is as safe as common medicines like Tylenol. On its website, Planned Parenthood claims that the abortion pill is actually “safer than many other medicines like penicillin, Tylenol, and Viagra.”
A new study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute titled “The Origins and Proliferation of Unfounded Comparisons Regarding the Safety of Mifepristone,” published May 24, however, debunks that claim, concluding that “no scientifically valid comparison between mifepristone and Tylenol exists.” The study noted that the abortion industry bases its claim on death rates while ignoring other “serious adverse events such as heavy bleeding and severe abdominal pain, which are critical to a holistic safety assessment.”
“For years now, the abortion lobby’s claim that abortion drugs are ‘safer than Tylenol’ has dominated public discussion, propelled by the illusion of scientific consensus. However, no such support exists,” said Cameron Louttit, author of the study and director of life sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “This baseless claim, repeated by medical societies, politicians, media pundits and researchers, has profoundly influenced public opinion and policy. But as this paper details, those spreading it lack the evidence they routinely claim.”
According to the study, “In collapsing complex safety considerations into simplistic comparisons that leverage wholly incomparable metrics, these assertions systematically violate the norms and regulations that inform evidence-based biomedical communication. Not only have the comparisons between Mifepristone and other drugs failed in their duty to adequately assess this impossibility, but they have also demonstrated a complete disregard for the need to communicate comprehensive and truthful safety information to patients, policymakers, jurists, and the public.”
“The claim that abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol is a reckless slogan that is not backed by science. Yet the claim is aggressively pushed by the legacy media and politicians focused on advancing a pro-abortion agenda and stripping away safeguards on drugs responsible for the majority of abortions in the United States,” Katie Daniel of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America told the Daily Caller. “Not to mention, the Biden Administration’s decision to strip away in-person dispensing requirements fueled an unregulated online drug market, all in the name of ideological convenience. Americans deserve evidence-based policy, not political slogans that put women’s lives at risk.”
Evidence that the abortion pill is dangerous has long been both prominent and ignored. In a devastating analysis published in First Things earlier this month titled “The Case Against the Abortion Pill,” Rachel Roth Aldhizer wrote:
The FDA claims this process is safe, with an extremely low complication rate. But there is another story: one in which a child dies and a woman’s body becomes collateral damage in the culture war. This is a story in which a woman is nearly three times more likely to die in the year following an abortion than in the year following a live birth. In this story, medical abortions induce an unnatural process, one in which up to 20 percent of women experience a complication—four times the complication rate of surgical abortion. The medical abortion process is designed to hide adverse events and discourage patient follow-up. Women seeking abortion receive lower standards of care than do women suffering miscarriage, despite advocates’ claims that miscarriage and chemical abortion are the same physiological processes with an identical treatment regimen.
Aldhizer’s analysis tracks with a recent study by Ethics and Public Policy (EPPC) by Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which examined a database of U.S. insurance claims from 2017 to 2023 that contained over 865,000 cases in which abortion pills were prescribed. Hall and Anderson found that almost 11% of women experienced serious complications after taking the abortion pill, including severe bleeding, infections, sepsis, or fallopian tube rupture; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the data as “alarming.”
The evidence against the abortion pill was already strong. Mifepristone kills babies in the womb; it also hurts their mothers. It is time for the government to act on this evidence. Lives depend on it.
