The Culture of Death and its lies

Can a revolution come down to a pill? Over the past century, tidal waves of moral revolution have transformed society and reshaped our moral landscape. Two of those revolutions were delivered as pills, and both pills were aimed against pregnancy and the gift of life. The first, now known simply as “The Pill,” came as oral birth control. That pill delivered the sexual revolution on a platter, liberating the act of sex from the gift of procreation. The subversion of marriage and the glorification of both adultery and premarital sex could not have happened without the pill. That pill promised instant medicalized freedom from the “risk” of pregnancy.

The second pill is the abortion pill, developed a generation later. Most specifically, medicalized abortion by pills became possible with the development of mifepristone by drug maker Roussel Uclaf of Fance. Mifepristone, generally known in the United States as Mifeprex, causes the woman’s body to reject and expel the unwanted pregnancy. From the beginning, pro-abortion forces in the United States saw great opportunity in that pill. Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the drug only under certain conditions. The pregnancy had to be in its early weeks, an authorized physician had to prescribe it, the pill had to be administered in an authorized clinical setting, and the doctor had to confirm that the pregnancy was in its early weeks and that there was no ectopic pregnancy.

Pro-abortion advocates worked overtime to liberalize these rules and make the pill widely available—just as had been done with the birth control pill. Fast forward and the landscape changed with the arrival, for example, of the pandemic. With office visits made more difficult under pandemic protocols and with prescriptions by mail instantly made necessary, abortion advocates saw their chance. They put pressure on the FDA to lift restrictions on mifepristone prescriptions, and under the Biden administration, key restrictions and directives were lifted. Then came the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022, reversing Roe v. Wade and returning the abortion question to the states—at least the question of surgical abortions, such as take place in abortion clinics.

Almost immediately, abortion rights advocates saw their chance to go for broke on mifepristone. In 2023 the FDA released its current Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy which basically gutted the previous restrictions. The pill can now be prescribed with a single telehealth “visit” with a health-care provider who is often not a physician. The pill can be mailed to the woman and she can take the pill at home. Abortion rights activists and politicians then moved, with stunning success, to make the pill broadly available by mail, often paid for or subsidized by the abortion rights movement, by a network designed to make the pill available to women in states that restrict abortion.

Furthermore, it was promised and packaged as “safe.” One recent report claimed that the combined medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are “97.4 percent effective and safer than Tylenol.”

Except, they aren’t. Just yesterday, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a major think tank in Washington, D.C., released a major study that reveals a very different reality. Jamie Bryan Hall, EPPC director of data analysis, and Ryan T. Anderson, its president, released a stunning indictment of the shoddy research used by advocates of abortion. The research cited by advocates for the pill was based only on 10 clinical trials with 30,966 participants. The EPPC study looked carefully at no less than 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions.

What did they find? They revealed that no less than 10.93% of women had experienced “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.” That number is “at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of ‘less than 0.5 percent’ in clinical trials reported on the drug level.”

This is how the Culture of Death works. It kills and it harms. It directs its attack directly on the unborn. It deliberately ignores the “harm” intentionally inflicted on the unborn child and then misrepresents the risk of harm to the mother as well. It runs on a high-speed rail of lies and then it piles further lies on top.

Just three days before the EPPC released its study, Washington Monthly ran an article by Carrie N. Baker with the headline, “How Reproductive Freedom Advocates Outsmarted the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Baker is a professor at Smith College, where she is also chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. Baker describes how abortion advocates used the pandemic and “the development of community support networks” to go around abortion restrictions in red states. She celebrates the fact that “women in states with bans are accessing telehealth abortion from providers in eight states—California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—that have telehealth provider shield laws allowing clinicians to serve those seeking abortions no matter where in the U.S. they reside.”

And that, she celebrates, is how the abortion rights movement and its networks “outsmarted the anti-abortion movement.” And now you know. Furthermore, in her book, Abortion Pills: U.S. History and Politics, Baker ends her text with the chilling claim that, thanks to mifepristone and determined networks, “advocates had made safe abortion much more widely available than before Roe—and in some respects even during Roe.”

In other words, abortion is more widely available now than when Roe was the law of the land. The Supreme Court reversed Roe, but the Culture of Death darkly advanced. Abortion numbers are up and it is now estimated that two-thirds of all abortions come by the pill, which often comes by mail.

It also comes with lies, and one of those lies puts women at immediate danger. It’s high time the FDA reconsiders and takes down its current protocols and responds to this clear threat to women and their health. Armed with this information, the Trump administration needs to act fast, and the same is true for Congress. We have just been told how the abortion rights movement outsmarted the cause for life. The truth has been slapped in our face. We know what is at stake. Are we going to do anything about it?

The EPPC study can be read in full here.