After a 15-month investigation, 39-year-old Dia Beshara was arrested on July 3rd and charged with giving the abortifacient mifepristone to a pregnant woman without her knowledge triggering a miscarriage. The local County Sheriff’s Office posted this summary:
On July 3, 2023, the Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office arrested Dia A. Beshara, a 39 year old resident of Schaghticoke. Beshara was charged with Assault in the Second Degree at the conclusion of a 15 month investigation. The investigation began when the female victim reported that, while she was pregnant, Beshara gave her a drug, Mifepristone, without her knowledge, causing a miscarriage. Beshara was arraigned in Schaghticoke Town Court where he was released on his own recognizance with an order of protection in place.
This is only the most recent illustration of how women can be slipped the abortion pill without their knowledge or consent. In her account [https://www.liveaction.org/news/new-york-man-arrested-abortion-pill], Nancy Flanders cited two examples:
In April of 2022, Jeffery Smith was sentenced to 20 years in prison as part of a plea agreement after he was convicted of attempted first-degree intentional homicide of a preborn child who was 21 weeks old at the time.
Jin Mimae was arrested in February 2021 for tricking his pregnant girlfriend into taking mifepristone. Upon his arrest, he told police, “I didn’t want to marry her,” adding, “Because of the current economic conditions, I did not want to raise a child.” He had ordered mifepristone online the same day his girlfriend had a positive pregnancy test and told her they were to treat an STD.
Mifepristone is the first of two drugs used in the abortion pill regimen. “It acts to block the hormone progesterone, which works during the first weeks of pregnancy to sustain the developing preborn baby’s life,” writes Jor-El Godsey. “Progesterone also prevents muscle contractions in the uterus that would cause the woman’s body to reject the newly-created life.”
Godsey explains that at the behest of the Biden administration, the FDA
reduced rules designed to protect women from harm (known as REMS) such as required in-person doctor visits that had been in place for more than two decades despite knowing that ectopic pregnancy is “responsible for 9% of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States.” The FDA did this even while its own website notes women, “should not take mifepristone, in a regimen with misoprostol, for medical termination of pregnancy if they have an ectopic pregnancy.”
In addition to tricking women into swallowing the drug, mifepristone is also associated with many more complications that a surgical abortion. That’s why idea that taking the two-drugs is safer than “taking a Tylenol” is so dangerous.
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.
Chelsea Garcia is a political writer with a special interest in international relations and social issues. Events surrounding the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel are a major focus for political journalists. But as a former local reporter, she is also interested in national politics.
Chelsea Garcia studied media, communication and political science in Texas, USA, and learned the journalistic trade during an internship at a daily newspaper. In addition to her political writing, she is pursuing a master's degree in multimedia and writing at Texas.
