Tag Archive for: Abortion Drug

Louisiana Blazes Trail to Classify Abortion Pill as ‘Controlled Substance’

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The abortion drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol is advertised by abortion giants such as Planned Parenthood as “safe” and “effective.” But researchers have unveiled evidence that proves these pills, which work together to end the life of an unborn baby, are not safe.

And yet, the use of chemical abortion is spreading. As reported in March, it took just six months for three of California’s colleges to carry out over 420 abortions with the abortion drug. In an effort to combat this increased usage of these harmful substances, states such as Louisiana have put forth legislation to criminalize obtaining mifepristone and misoprostol without a legitimate prescription.

The Louisiana state Senate and House recognized the dangers these drugs present and have chosen not to take those risks lightly. Last week, SB 276 was passed with overwhelming support in the state Senate (27-9), with a 63-29 vote in the state House. And on Friday, Governor Jeff Landry (R) officially signed the bill into law, making Louisiana the first U.S. state to enact legislation that classifies chemical abortion pills as “controlled substances.”

As The Daily Wire reported, the bill “adds both mifepristone and misoprostol to the state’s list of dangerous controlled substances and creates punishment for coerced abortions,” including potential prison time and fines up to $5,000. The law, sponsored by Senator Thomas Pressly (R-La.), will take effect October 1, 2024. “This is a huge piece of legislation,” lauded Jody Hice, former congressman and guest host Friday’s episode of “Washington Watch.”

Pressly, who celebrated the legislation being signed into law, expressed how the motivation behind the bill was personal. “[M]y sister was the victim of a horrible domestic violence attack,” he told Hice. He explained how she and her husband “were going through some marital issues,” and in the heat of their disagreements, her husband “tried to poison her seven times with [mifepristone]” by crushing it up and putting it in a drink he then gave to his pregnant wife. Catherine, Pressly’s sister, noticed what her husband was attempting to do and “was able to take the abortion reversal pill and able to save the life of my now 22-month-old niece,” the senator shared.

“Thank God,” he added, Catherine and her baby girl are “alive and doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances … during the first trimester of pregnancy.” Ultimately, Pressly emphasized, the danger of chemical abortion “was a personal issue for me.” And it’s his sister’s story he now hopes can aid in protecting “other women from having this horrible attack happen to them.”

Hice expressed how “there’s so much fear mongering from the abortion industry about this legislation.” As he emphasized, “Some tell us [mifepristone is] no more dangerous than Advil or some other similar drug.” But according to Hice, these criticisms clearly “missed the mark,” as “this is a huge problem across the board.”

“Oh, it truly is,” Pressly stated. “My goal in this is … to ensure that we are protecting life.” Additionally, the goal of the Louisiana law, as the senator described, is to allow “health care professionals to do their job and ensure that these pills are being used in a proper way that is not for elective abortion,” which Hice stated was “a great step in the right direction.”

Hice asked, “How can other states follow Louisiana’s lead on this extremely important issue?” According to Pressley, the first step in helping other states follow suit is to educate them on the dangers of chemical abortion. “[W]hen you look at the risk to the public,” Pressly pointed out, “not only to the unborn babies, but also to the mothers who could be poisoned with these pills as my sister was … it’s untenable that we don’t do more to protect women and protect the unborn in these situations.” But what it boils down to, the senator continued, is that “we’ve got to put more protections in place,” which is “exactly what we did in Louisiana. And I hope that other states will continue to follow our lead on that.”

Pressly explained how the Left will portray this law as something negative, as conservatives “not caring for women.” But the senator wanted “to be very clear” that this legislation does have both the well-being of the mother and the child in mind. He concluded, “We’re simply saying that it should be a doctor that’s making a … prescription and allowing it to move forward when it’s not for abortion. But in Louisiana, we do not allow abortion.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: School-Based ‘Health Center’ Offers Seattle Students Hormone Drugs

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Florida Is Now One of the Most Pro-Life States in America. Here’s How It All Could Be Undone in November.

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In the same day, the Florida Supreme Court handed down two vastly different opinions with life-or-death implications for the preborn. One decision affirmed that there is no right to abortion in the Florida Constitution and the other allowed an abortion amendment to move forward — which would permit virtually unfettered access to abortion — to appear on the Florida ballot.

Until then, Florida will be among the most pro-life states in the country with robust protections for the preborn after the Florida Supreme Court’s 6-1 ruling against Planned Parenthood. On April 1, the court overrode previous abortion opinions dating back to 1989 and upheld the 15-week abortion ban. Because of this, the six-week abortion ban, which corresponds with when a preborn baby’s heart begins beating, will soon be in effect.

But in November, all of this could be undone. While this ruling was a huge win for life in Florida, it could be overridden if Floridians vote to pass the abortion ballot measure the court also approved.

On February 7, I argued before the Florida Supreme Court to reject this abortion amendment from appearing on the ballot for its violation of state law. Unfortunately, the Court ruled 4-3 to the contrary. Should the amendment appear on November’s ballot, it would enshrine abortion in the state constitution and make the Sunshine State a graveyard for the preborn with virtually no restrictions on abortion if voted on by 60% of Florida voters.

It’s important for Floridians to be aware of this extreme amendment’s broad, destructive implications, and it’s equally as important for Americans nationwide to understand that the far-reaching agenda to put abortion on state ballots does not stop with Florida. Other states, such as Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, are also being targeted by the pro-abortion movement for abortion measures to appear on ballots in November.

Since the fall of Roe, the pro-life movement is zero-for-seven in abortion-related ballot measures, with losses in California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana, Kansas, and most recently, Ohio. This is partially due to the propagation of lies and fearmongering from the pro-abortion movement to sway even moderately pro-life Americans into siding with abortion.

Of particular concern in the deceptive strategy to enshrine abortion through state ballot initiatives is that the language used often conceals the sweeping scope of the initiatives.

The pro-abortion movement relies heavily on lies and gaslighting for public support because promoting what abortion truly is — the killing of preborn babies — is not a winning message. To get around this, the pro-abortion movement uses undefined, deceptive terms and euphemisms like “clump of cells,” “women’s health,” and “reproductive freedom” to mislead the masses. The use of vague language was certainly the case for the Florida amendment, and this was one of my arguments against the amendment before the court earlier this year.

In her dissent to the court’s opinion, Justice Jamie Grosshans agreed with my argument and laid out just how voters can be easily misled by the deceptive ballot summary for the abortion amendment.

“A voter may think this amendment simply returns Florida to a pre-Dobbs status quo. It does not,” she wrote. “A voter may think that a healthcare provider would be clearly defined as a licensed physician specializing in women’s health. It is not. A voter may think that viability falls within a readily apparent time frame. It does not. … And, critically, the voter may think this amendment results in settling this issue once and for all. It does not. Instead, this amendment returns abortion issues back to the courts to interpret scope, boundary, definitions, and policy, effectively removing it from the people and their elected representatives. Perhaps this is a choice that Floridians wish to make, but it should be done with clarity as to their vote’s ramifications and not based on a misleading ballot summary.”

Justice Renatha Francis reiterated the conflict of the amendment’s ambiguity in her dissent, stating that the amendment is a “Trojan horse for the elimination of any recognition of the State’s interest in protecting what Roe termed ‘potential life.’”

A Trojan horse, indeed.

What the amendment’s ballot summary doesn’t say is that the term “health care provider,” the person who could prescribe a post-viability abortion for “health” reasons, includes nearly 60 professions, including tattoo artists and massage therapists.

It leaves out the fact that every pro-life law in Florida (except potentially the parental notification requirement) would be overruled, paving the way for unrestricted abortion access.

It fails to mention that the amendment would authorize abortion for any reason at any time up to birth and endangers women by removing health and safety regulations.

It also neglects to add that the “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion” language would tie the hands of the legislature from enacting any laws to protect preborn lives or their mothers.

The reality of the abortion amendment in Florida is that it will hurt women and enshrine the “right” to kill children in the Florida Constitution. The amendments on the ballot in other states follow a similar blueprint and would steamroll existing pro-life protections.

I previously warned the Florida amendment would be a “slippery slope to infanticide” and give the “abortion industry license to murder preborn babies without restriction or regulation.” I stand by these words completely and warn Floridians not to be complicit in the pro-abortion movement’s goal to legalize and normalize the genocide of the preborn by voting for this radical amendment.

The preborn are the most vulnerable and marginalized group in the U.S., and we will continue fighting for Florida to remain one of the most pro-life states in the nation and for pro-life protections to be extended to all 50 states.

AUTHOR

Mat Staver

Mat Staver is the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Kamala Harris’s Hypocrisy On ‘Women Having Miscarriages In Toilets’

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It almost seems ridiculous to point out that a politician did something hypocritical, but Kamala Harris inverted reality in an especially egregious way during her first (and hopefully last) vice presidential visit to an abortion facility last week. As part of her ongoing campaign against life, she claimed, “I have heard stories of — and have met with women who had miscarriages in — in toilets.” Like most of Harris’s speeches, she had said it all before. The vice president shared a video clip of herself repeating the same story on “The View” in January. Harris said she could not believe states still resist abortion “in this year of our Lord 2024,” before saying, “Women are having miscarriages in toilets.”

Harris presumably said this because she believes having a miscarriage in a toilet is a grave injustice to mother and child. Yet Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are actively promoting the outcome they claim to be fighting. The Biden-Harris administration has boasted in its proposed 2025 budget it has done all it can to “protect access to abortion, including medication abortion,” and it has taken numerous steps to shut down efforts to halt the distribution of abortion pills.

But having a miscarriage in a toilet is precisely how chemical abortion works. Don’t take my word for it; listen to the abortionists themselves. In a website titled “How does the abortion pill work?” Planned Parenthood notes, “The abortion pill process has several steps and usually includes 2 different medicines: mifepristone and misoprostol. You can also have an abortion using only misoprostol.” The abortion cocktail “causes cramping and bleeding that empties your uterus. The pregnancy tissue will come out through your vagina. The process is very similar to an early miscarriage. … For most people, medication abortion feels like having an early miscarriage.” Planned Parenthood has a list of items for mid-abortion women to “make you more comfortable.”

“Sit on the toilet,” Planned Parenthood’s abortion pill website tells women.

It’s not even merely the United States; the British abortion business BPAS instructs abortion-minded mothers that their aborted child’s remains “can be flushed down the lavatory or wrapped in tissue, placed in a small plastic bag and put in the dustbin [trash can].”

This is not a new phenomenon that Harris, or any reasonably informed person, might not have heard. It dates all the way back to the very first “M&M trials” of the abortion pills in Des Moines in 1994. “I aborted at 6:30 on Friday night. I heard it fall into the toilet. It looked like a blood clot. I cried when I knew it had passed,” recalled “Patient 001.” It permeates the medical advice abortionists give mothers along with the mifepristone and misoprostol that induce the miscarriage-like abortion.

Leslie Wolbert took Planned Parenthood’s advice. Leslie had a chemical abortion using RU-486 at age 21. “I thought I was dying,” because of the pain caused by her cramps, she said. “I was crying hysterically and begging to die because the pain was more than I could handle. I was sweating like crazy and on the toilet while throwing up too.” In the shower, “I bled so much that it clogged the drain.” When she looked down, she saw “the ‘blood clot’ or the ‘blob of tissue’ that the clinic talked about. It was my baby that was clogging the drain of the shower. I had to turn off the water, get out, and clean it up myself and then I flushed it down the toilet.”

“It was even more horrifying than it sounds,” Leslie swore in an affidavit for a 2013 Supreme Court case.

Wolbert’s story is cited in the Supreme Court case to reverse FDA approval of the abortion pill — a lawsuit the Biden-Harris administration has fought tooth-and-nail.

Unfortunately, Leslie’s story is the norm, rather than the exception. “I looked down, and I screamed,” said one mother. “It was not just a blob of tissue. I gave birth to what looked like a fully formed, intact, 14-week-old fetus covered in blood. I scooped my baby out of the toilet. I sat on the floor, and held him, and cried.”

Part of the problem of self-managed abortions comes from discovering the reality of human life, alone, when it’s too late. Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, has written in The Washington Stand, “It’s hard to put into context the damage caused to a mother who expected to see a clump of cells and instead sees her visibly recognizable unborn child delivered dead into the toilet.” Her words were echoed by “Courtney,” who recounted the grief she experienced precisely over her deceased child’s final resting place. “My cramps were very intense and painful,” she said. “My baby was disposed of in a toilet. A toilet.”

Sometimes the baby doesn’t just look fully-formed. One grieving mother sued Planned Parenthood claiming that during a brief telehealth session, the abortionist miscalculated her full-term pregnancy at six weeks and gave her a prescription for the abortion pill. As a result, in May 2020, the woman gave birth to her dead-but-fully-formed, 30-36 week-old baby on the toilet. “At approximately 3:00 am, while sitting on the toilet, Plaintiff gave birth to a fully formed, stillborn baby boy named J.T.,” says the 2021 lawsuit. “Plaintiff was shocked and traumatized when she saw the lifeless, fully-formed baby in the toilet covered in mucous, blood, and the placenta.”

The abortion industry regularly tells its patients to dispose of their babies in the toilet, and not just during chemical abortions. Dr. Kathi Aultman, a retired OB-GYN and former medical director for Planned Parenthood of Jacksonville, described how a woman once came to her experiencing “prolonged bleeding from a late-term abortion.” The woman’s story shocked Dr. Aultman to the core. The injured mother “described being given medication and then being left in a cold room overnight with no blanket or call button. The next day, she was given more medication, and eventually told to sit on the toilet and push. She delivered a living 20-week-old baby boy into the toilet, where he drowned.”

“The experience traumatized her,” wrote Dr. Aultman.

A counselor at the Dr. Emily Woman’s Health Center in The Bronx told one woman experiencing a late-term abortion what to do if she passes a third-trimester baby in her hotel room. “If it comes out, then it comes out. Flush it,” she said.

The (now deceased) abortionist Carman Landau gave the same advice to a 27-week pregnant woman at Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque, New Mexico. If the child passes, she should “sit on the toilet” and “not move until we come and get you.”

The abortion industry will inevitably claim these “sting” videos were “heavily edited” and imply they are untrustworthy (although Live Action has shared its full, unedited footage of various investigations). Those disinclined to believe Live Action can’t explain away Planned Parenthood and BPAS, nor even numerous left-leaning news outlets.

In a 2022 story published on the feminist website The 19th, republished by PBS (at your expense), a woman named Emma Texas took misoprostol. When it kicked in, Emma “could hardly walk from the pain,” so her boyfriend had to “physically steer her to the toilet.” Since the baby survived that abortion attempt — so much for Planned Parenthood’s medical advice — she took both abortion pills and aborted her baby. “That medication abortion was the most painful experience I’ve ever had in my life,” Emma remembered. “I literally said to my boyfriend — who, that time, knew better and just stayed with me the entire time — I said, ‘I just want to die.’”

The cries, the anguish, the heartbreak of these women are being muffled, multiplied, and ignored each time Kamala Harris and other elected officials promote the use of abortion pills. Women’s suffering is ignored, drowned out by the campaign cash that politicians rake in each election cycle from the abortion industry. These stories should be repeated over and over again, until the manufacturers of the abortion pill note one of its prime side effects is intense grief.

Kamala Harris should spend more time listening to these women and less time hypocritically supporting the industry that victimized them.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Vice President Kamala Harris tours an abortion mill

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.