On the same day that the Biden administration inexplicably halted administration of the lifesaving Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration is now allowing mifepristone and misoprostol, pills used to induce abortions, to be sold by mail and self-administered by patients.
The administration’s decision not only flies in the face of scientific values, but it also evinces an unwillingness to treat the abortion debate as anything more than a battle in the culture war.
If Joe Biden were serious about working across the aisle, there’s one point of widespread agreement in which progress in the abortion debate could be made. A staggering 92% of people in the United States deem birth control morally permissible, including some 3 in 4 of those who believe abortion to be morally wrong. Despite this, uninsured women are stuck paying not only for a doctor’s appointment to get a prescription but also the list price of birth control, which has actually exploded as a result of Obamacare’s contraception mandate.
An easy solution would be to deregulate oral contraceptives so that uninsured women can acquire them over the counter, reducing the pill’s list price over time and reducing unplanned pregnancies among a demographic least able to afford children. Lucky for Biden, Senate Republicans such as Joni Ernst of Iowa, among others, are on board with this.
Yet, instead of choosing an electoral winner that would focus on the demand side of the abortion equation, Biden has chosen to go all-in on expanding the supply of abortion under the guise of pandemic precautions. Not only that, he’s doing so at the genuine risk to public health.
Even as the abortion rate has plummeted to its lowest level since Roe v. Wade, chemical abortions have increased. They are slightly less effective at ending a pregnancy, with 3% to 5% of women eventually requiring a surgical abortion due to excessive bleeding or other complications. Medical abortions usually require two visits: one for an exam and another to ensure the abortion is complete and without complications. By deregulating chemical abortions, the FDA is giving women who think they’re fine after the procedure an easy excuse to skip that second visit, something that could, in rare instances, kill them.
No, it’s not common. But medical abortions are orders of magnitude more dangerous than oral contraceptives and significantly even more so than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. A 2010 study found that 1 in 115 medical abortion patients wound up in the emergency department. Compare that to 1 to 5 women out of every 10,000 oral contraception users who will develop a blood clot in a given year, and of course, to the 1 in 1 million who will get one from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Biden considers the pandemic serious enough to let women medicate themselves with pills that will put nearly 1% of them in the ER, but not serious enough to allow the dissemination of a pandemic-ending vaccine that has put a grand total of six people in the hospital. Furthermore, this supposedly back-slapping bipartisan is choosing the most radical and unilateral option to eke a win in the culture war rather than sit Republicans down at the table and hash out a straightforward contraception deregulation that would disproportionately benefit poor women and women of color — all without terminating a single pregnancy.
So much for listening to The Science.
