Written by Patricia Mosley

As part of their COVID-19 response, the U.K. initially approved new measures to allow women to take the complete abortion pill regimen at home. Now, it appears that this measure has been reversed. The reasoning given was, “This was published in error. There will be no changes to abortion regulations.”

The abortion pill is a two-drug regimen that is basically a do-it-yourself method anyways, but normally, the woman would have some type of interaction with a physician by taking the first pill (mifepristone) under their supervision at the clinic and then going home to take the second drug (misoprostol) 24-48 hours later.

Because the U.K. considers abortion an “essential service” amid the pandemic, their response was to completely place the burden of abortion on women. These women would have been popping both pills at home with no physician oversight.

But this is what the abortion industry all over the world has been calling for even before the current pandemic—for abortions to be unrestricted, unregulated, and do-it-yourself. Gone are the days when they were calling for “safe, legal, and rare” to protect against desperate women performing their own “back-alley” abortions. Now abortion pills are the new back-alley method, credentialed by the world’s most prestigious medical institutions.

Because the U.S. has FDA restrictions (REMs) on the abortion pill (U.S. brand “Mifeprex”), it cannot be a “complete” DIY method, but either way, restrictions or no restrictions, the abortion pill method is set up to be an at-home, multi-day, traumatic process that comes with the risk of serious complications.

Chemical abortions carry four times the rate of complications compared to surgical abortions. The two side effects observed to be more prevalent during chemical abortions than surgical abortions were hemorrhage and incomplete abortion. An incomplete abortion means there needed to be surgical intervention to extract any remaining parts of the unborn child from the woman’s uterus. Prolonged hemorrhage requiring blood transfusion can occur. It’s already been reported to the FDA that over 500 blood transfusions, over a thousand hospitalizations, and 24 deaths took place as result of Mifeprex. And that is just what’s been reported.

Fortunately right now, the U.S. has strong pro-life leadership from the top down, so at a national level it’s unlikely that we will see abortion be declared an “essential service” at a time like this. However, that will not stop the abortion industry from demanding that it should be. Some states have already deemed abortion “essential.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and their allies have already put out a statement complaining that abortions are being left out of essential health care services that need to remain open at this time. Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio is at war with the state Attorney General and Health Department as they continue to perform abortions even though they have been directly ordered not to.

Planned Parenthood claims they can still achieve the goal of conserving medical resources for essential health care personnel combatting COVID-19 by remaining open. How would they do this? They didn’t explain.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to deduce that the abortion industry is likely dispensing abortion pills to pregnant women who are past the FDA-approved gestational age limit of 10 weeks. The abortion industry has already been experimenting with performing abortions past 13 weeks on vulnerable women in Burkina Faso, Columbia, and Mexico.

Even the once abortion-neutral humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders (DWB), with the approval of the World Health Organization, has instructional guidelines on how women can perform their own drug-based abortion up to 22 weeks!

Although they claim these instructional videos are for training their medical workers, they acknowledge that they expect women to go to the site in order to learn how to induce their own abortions.

The fact that chemical abortions already carry significant complications and that the rate of those complications only increase as the gestational age of the pregnancy increases shows that Doctors Without Borders are bordering on medical malpractice.

The complications that can arise from taking the abortion pill place women in life-threatening situations that may require follow-up visits to the abortion clinic and the emergency room. We are now likely to see scenarios where women who have taken the abortion pill regimen will need blood transfusions, treatment for infections, and possible follow-up surgery to complete the abortion, which means they will need to go to the emergency room and wait for treatment next to possible victims of the coronavirus pandemic. How is this conserving medical resources? How is this protecting the safety and health of women?

Thankfully, there are still some reputable medical leaders, such as AAPLOG, who refuse to put women in this type of danger by categorizing abortion as an “essential service.”

Killing innocent children in the womb should never be considered any type of “service,” in the midst of a pandemic or not. By encouraging women to self-manage an abortion up to 22 weeks and calling do-it-yourself abortion a “paid” service, the abortion industry has been and is currently showing us that they have no regard for human dignity whatsoever—for the child or the mother.

This article was originally published at the FRCblog.com.

In 1986, Missouri became the first state to pass an abortion law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital “in the community” to ensure the health and safety of women undergoing abortion.

Later, I was horrified to find out that a doctor was doing abortions just a few miles from my home in St. Louis. It turned out that his admitting privileges were in another country! The abortion clinic was closed.

As I wrote last August in “Pro-abortion Desperation in Missouri” :

“the last abortion clinic in Missouri lost its license because of numerous health and safety violations. The Planned Parenthood abortion clinic continues to operate only because of several temporary injunctions by a judge.”

While the Missouri case is still ongoing, now the U.S. Supreme Court is considering the June Medical Services v. Russo case concerning whether Louisiana’s law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital conflicts with the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt decision along with a second issue about “whether abortion providers can legally represent the interests of women seeking an abortion when those providers sue to overthrow laws protecting those women’s health and safety.”

IS ABORTION MORE IMPORTANT THAN SAFETY?

In a powerful commentary titled “The OB-GYNs Who Play Politics With Women’s Lives-Abortion is more important than safety to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists” in the March 3, 2020 Wall Street Journal, Dr. Christina Francis calls out the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for “offering a medically unsound recommendation in the furtherance of its extreme position on abortion”.

Dr. Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and the chairman of the board of the American Association of Prolife OB/GYNS, refutes ACOG’s friend of the court brief arguing that the admitting privileges requirement for abortionists is not “‘medically justified’ and therefore constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on a woman’s right to abortion’” by stating:

“Yet every second counts in an obstetric emergency. A pregnant woman experiencing severe uterine hemorrhage can bleed to death in as little as 10 minutes. That’s why its essential that anyone performing an abortion have the ability to admit a patient to a nearby hospital—preferably one closer than 30 miles away.”

ACOG routinely puts politics ahead of medicine by adopting the most extreme positions on abortion. It has lobbied and briefed against parental notification of minors and informed-consent laws, and in favor of taxpayer-funded abortion. It has advocated for laws restricting speech around clinics and compelling pro-life pregnancy centers to tell women where they can go to obtain state-subsidized abortions. ACOG’s work has gotten so political that in 2008 it added a lobbying arm. I was refused when I asked if I could direct our dues only to the organization’s nonlobbying arm.

Eighty-six percent of OB-GYNs don’t perform abortions, but ACOG’s position is that you either support the most extreme abortion lobbying or you’re off the island. Most of ACOG’s abortion advocacy is undertaken free of consultation with its almost 60,000 members. Physicians who’ve left the organization, like me, support its general work but don’t want to support abortion lobbying, especially when it comes to watering down or eliminating safety standards. (Emphasis added)

Dr. Ford also notes that:

“In any practice area other than abortion, a doctor performing an operation would have hospital-admitting privileges. In the case of complications that doctor would, at a minimum, call ahead to fast-track the patient to the appropriate emergency care. Abortion-clinic patients, on the other hand, are frequently kicked to the curb and told to make their own way to the emergency room.”

CONCLUSION

Those of us in Missouri have seen the problems and attempted coverups at the hopefully last Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis.  Just last year, it was reported that:

“Operation Rescue, with the help of Missouri pro-life activists, has documented 74 medical emergencies that have occurred at RHS Planned Parenthood in the past ten years, including three emergencies that required ambulance transport for women to a local hospital within a 22-day period ending on May 15, 2019.” (Emphasis added)

The U.S. Supreme Court decision is not expected until June and is likely to have an enormous impact on the state of abortion in our country, especially since pro-abortion groups have now abandoned the old rhetoric about keeping abortion “safe, legal and rare’” in favor of tax-payer funded abortion on demand up to birth and even leaving babies to die after failed abortions.

In the meantime, considering choosing and supporting pro-life health care professionals and their professional organizations such as the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the National Association of Pro-life Nurses (NAPN).

This article was originally published at NancyValko.com.