As a woman who carries the scars of having a chemical abortion all alone without anyone by my side, I was obviously disappointed that the Food and Drug Administration managed to avoid accountability last month at the U.S. Supreme Court for its reckless disregard for women’s health. But I am very pleased to learn that it’s not over.
Three states stand ready to hold the FDA accountable—and that’s good, because the FDA’s callous removal of its original protections for women using chemical abortion drugs has harmed countless women.
For now, the FDA will continue to put the abortion drug industry’s profit over women’s well-being, even though its own label for abortion drugs says that roughly 1 in 25 women who use them will end up in the emergency room. It will continue to refuse to ensure we receive the ongoing, in-person care of a doctor while taking abortion drugs, even though data the FDA cites shows that hospitalizations increase 300% with no in-person doctor visit.
But women matter more than a political agenda or the financial coffers of drug manufacturers. Women deserve excellent health care, and we deserve to have the in-person care of a doctor when taking high-risk drugs.
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The FDA should be required to at least reinstate basic in-person doctor visits to ensure women don’t have ectopic pregnancies, aren’t severely bleeding, or facing other life-threatening conditions when taking chemical abortion drugs.
Sadly, based on a legal technicality, the Supreme Court declined to address the merits of a case that sought to hold the FDA accountable for its disregard for women’s health. But that could change in the future.
Regardless of one’s views about abortion, women’s safety, health, and well-being matters. Everyone should agree that our daughters, mothers, and sisters shouldn’t be left to take these high-risk drugs all alone on the cold bathroom floor or in a dorm room. Women should unite to call out the hypocrisy of the FDA’s claim that it cares about women and demand that it do better.
Those of us who have had chemical abortions all alone, bled until we thought we were going to die, and held our tiny, lifeless babies not knowing what to do with them know this firsthand.
While the FDA escaped accountability in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the case in which Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys represented four doctors and four medical associations who wanted safeguards for women restored, we know that the agency’s reckless actions can’t be ignored forever. We as women across this country should come together to stand up for other women, because women’s health matters.
And no federal agency is above the law. If any other agency demonstrated such a reckless disregard for our health and well-being in any other context than abortion, there would be a huge uproar. But because people are afraid in this situation, women are left to suffer while drug companies continue to reap financial benefits, all in the name of celebrating and promoting women’s health.
Enough is enough.
As a woman who suffered profound physical and emotional harm from taking chemical abortion drugs all alone without seeing a doctor to check me for severe bleeding or life-threatening infections, I don’t want another woman to suffer from the FDA’s current policies.
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Abortion drugs, an abortion clinic worker assured me a few years ago, were the “safe, easy way” to end the life of a child my boyfriend didn’t want me to have. Just take two pills, and don’t call them in the morning. I’d hardly feel a thing, they promised.
In fact, I felt blinding pain, bled profusely, and wound up standing over my bathroom toilet, holding the amniotic sack, looking at the fingers and into the eyes of my unborn child. Then I flushed it down the toilet, and an entirely different kind of pain filled my heart—and my memory.
The pain and the bleeding continued for more than a month, but no doctor from the clinic ever called to check on me or to arrange for a follow-up visit. Nor did anyone warn me about the lifelong effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, while I’m astonished to hear Supreme Court justices tell me that emergency room doctors—who’ve seen case after case like mine firsthand—have no right to question the way my government’s FDA does things, I’m grateful the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho are standing in the gap to continue to champion women’s health and the requirement that the FDA do its job.
But I pray these states won’t be the only ones. I hope that women from many political and ideological perspectives will come together to ensure the FDA does better and puts our health first. We should expect the FDA to address why it’s OK to remove commonsense safety standards and leave us to do home abortions alone, and why it no longer thinks we matter enough to ensure doctors provide us with care.
We may not have felt we had a voice when we trusted clinics who told us the lie that these drugs would be easy and nearly pain-free. But we have a voice now. And we should use it.
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