Sen. Josh Hawley is introducing legislation to ban the most popular abortion drug on the market and give survivors a legal remedy against foreign abortion pill makers.
Mifepristone, the drug responsible for a majority of the nation’s abortions, poses a deadly and dangerous risk to unborn babies and is dangerous to women, especially when ingested unsupervised. Yet, under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s current regulations, the abortion pill can be ordered online and taken at home without any in-person medical oversight.
“It’s time for Congress to take action. We’ve known for years that mifepristone is risky, but it’s really just in the last few years that we’ve learned that this drug is inherently dangerous and it is inherently prone to abuse,” Hawley said at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.
The bill also targets the “greedy foreign corporations” Hawley said are making “billions of dollars in profits by endangering women’s health and shipping to them a drug that they know is dangerous.”
“They do it anyway because profit for them comes before people,” Hawley said, noting that “most of the websites, or many of them, where you can go to order this drug are hosted overseas, many of the drugs are mailed in from overseas, many of them are manufactured overseas.”
Abortion pill maker Danco Laboratories Inc., Hawley said, started with “the sole purpose of manufacturing mifepristone and introducing it into the United States” and was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to “avoid American liability,” “the American court system,” and “transparency.”
With the help of Democrat administrations, Danco’s mifepristone was distributed stateside beginning in 2000 and became “almost wholly unregulated” in less than 25 years, Hawley said: “They advocated at every turn…to reduce the safety protocols to remove all of the guardrails. Why? So that they could make more money.”
The rollback of FDA safeguards, Hawley added, was “by design by liberal administrations seeking to overrule the voters” and has caused countless babies and women harm.
More than one in 10 women who take mifepristone suffer a serious adverse event such as hemorrhage or infection. The risk of contracting a life-threatening side effect linked to pill-induced abortion is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and Danco claim. As researchers Ryan T. Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall recently revealed in The Federalist, “new research shows that the chemical abortion drug mifepristone became significantly more dangerous to women after the Biden administration watered down safety rules in an effort to appease pro-abortion advocates.”
The prominence of the abortion pill has also undoubtedly contributed to the number of babies and women who suffer the painful consequences of forced chemical abortion. During the press conference, several women pressured into a chemical abortion, including Louisiana v. FDA plaintiff Rosalie Markezich, shared their stories of bleeding their babies out in bathrooms at home alone.
“The truth is, because the drug comes in capsule form, and because it is, at this juncture, nearly completely unregulated, it is inherently prone to abuse,” Hawley continued. “This is a dangerous drug. This is a drug that is all too often used to hurt women.”
A majority of likely voters, including self-proclaimed pro-abortion Americans, want the FDA to protect women from the dangers of abortion pills. Hawley’s nonprofit, the Love Life Initiative, found that 64 percent of likely voters “across party lines” took issue with the FDA’s relaxed approach to the pills. Approximately 54 percent agreed that health and safety should be the FDA’s top priority when evaluating mifepristone.
HHS and the FDA — which has acknowledged the Biden administration “twisted the data to bury one of the safety signals” associated with the abortion-drug regimen — pledged to review new data indicating mifepristone causes significant harm. Hawley told The Federalist last month, however, that his conversations with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary indicated the “safety study thing is just a dead end.”
“It is time for Congress to ban the use of mifepristone for abortion, and it is time for Congress to give the victims, the survivors, many of whom are here today, the right to recover against this company that has inflicted harm on them solely for the purpose of making profits,” Hawley concluded.
Companion legislation to Hawley’s bill will be filed in the House by Republican Rep. Diana Harshbarger. If passed, the legislation would strip mifepristone of its FDA approval for abortions.
