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Abortion Pill Facts

ABORTION PILL FACTS

What is it?

Over half of abortions in the U.S. happen by pregnant women taking a sequence of pills. This is known as “chemical abortion.” Its supporters refer to it as “medical abortion” or “medication abortion.” Chemical abortion uses two drugs. First, mifepristone (also called by the brand name, Mifeprex, or RU-486) is taken to damage a woman’s uterine lining, cutting off nutrition and oxygen to her pre-born child, causing starvation and suffocation. Then, one to two days later, misoprostol is taken to push the baby’s remains from the womb. Fortunately, if a woman changes her mind before taking the second drug, the child may be saved about two-thirds of the time through an abortion pill reversal process involving the hormone progesterone.
(USCCB)

Why is it dangerous?

Chemical abortion is dangerous for women. From September 2000 through December 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recorded 4,218 “adverse events” caused by the process— including the deaths of 32 women. Although the FDA stopped requiring reports of non-fatal adverse events in 2016, a combination of pre-2016 required reporting and post-2016 voluntary reporting also indicates serious non-fatal consequences. These include 1,049 non-fatal hospitalizations, 604 cases of blood loss requiring transfusions, 97 ectopic pregnancies, and 418 infections of which 75 were “severe.” These numbers are likely underestimates, because many adverse events are experienced at home and treated in emergency rooms, where they are often reported as related to miscarriages rather than to abortion pills. (USCCB)

As the Guttmacher Institute states, medication abortion has proven to be a game changer in expanding abortion care in the United States. Women can now attend a telehealth call receive a prescription and have it sent directly to their local CVS or Walgreens to be filled. This wide access ignores that studies show one out of five women who use the two-drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol to procure an abortion will experience complications—a rate four times higher than for surgical abortion. (Source: Obstet Gynecol, 2009. Accessed June 12, 2024. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19888037/)

On top of these dangers and the easy access in Illinois, there is the use of new terms. For example, “medication abortion” is misleading. The Cambridge Dictionary defines “medication” as “medicine … used to improve a particular condition or illness.” The “condition” in pregnancy is simply the existence of a living human being. Mifepristone destroys, rather than improves, that condition. When, as every drug commercial states, “used as directed,” abortion chemicals will kill and then expel an unborn child from the womb. Such poisons are no more “medication” than the chemicals used in lethal injections in capital punishment. Join us in prayer and action to oppose chemical abortions and save innocent lives.

See VIDEO and information about the Abortion Pill HERE.