By Dave Andrusko
I’ve long since realized it is foolish to expect pro-abortionists to listen to themselves. If they did, it just might sound as silly to them as it does to us, and I suspect, deep down, that’s why they don’t.
Take Rep. Cori Bush, a pro-abortion Democrat from Missouri. On Monday she took the lead in a roundtable discussion with House Oversight Democrats to highlight why abortion pills are a “lifeline,” and “life-saving health care.”
Waving a packet of mifepristone pills, Rep. Bush announced, “This is what abortion looks like. This is it. One mifepristone with four misoprostol—this is an abortion….These five pills are safe. These five pills are effective. Medication abortion pills are no different than any other medication that is safe and effective.”
Warming to the task of trivializing what chemical abortions (medication abortion) do—take the life of young human being–at the same time pooh-poohing safe concerns, Bush announced “Banning medication abortion would be like placing a ban on Tylenol, a ban on antibiotics. There is no valid medical reason to do so; it’s only political propaganda.”
Really? No more than “political propaganda,” right?
We’ve debunked that silly (but dangerous) idea that taking the two-drugs is safer than taking a Tylenol. Indeed we’ve demonstrated that the rate of complications for chemical abortions is many times the rate of complications with surgical abortions.
As Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC director of education and research, has documented
A 2015 study of emergency room visits by University of California, San Francisco researcher Ushma Upadhyay is one of those often cited as proof that the rate of serious complications is “less than 1%.” Indeed, in “Incidence of emergency department visits and complications after abortion,” from the January 2015 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Upadhyay officially found that “The major complication rate was 0.23%,” less than a quarter of one percent.
But this depends on several questionable moves to finesse the data.
First, Upadhyay specifically limits what can be counted as a “serious” or “major” complication. “Major complications were defined as serious unexpected adverse events requiring hospital admission, surgery, or blood transfusion,” the article asserts. “Minor complications were all other expected adverse events.”
While this sounds reasonable, consider the things included in Upadhyay’s “minor complications”: hemorrhage, infection, incomplete or “failed” abortion requiring “uterine aspiration” (i.e., surgical abortion). Even things like “uterine perforation” were classified as “minor.”
Second, with this knowledge, consider that when Upadhyay added in and counted both major and “minor” complications, the complication rate for chemical abortions was 5.19% – considerably higher than the “less than one percent” advertised.
Medication abortions are lethal for unborn babies and a danger to the mother who undergoes one.