One of the leading propaganda claims of the forced-birthers since they began their crusade against women’s reproductive rights has been that they want to ensure women are safely treated at abortion clinics. That, of course, is something every sane person wants. But this professed concern from the forced-birthers is actually a clumsy distraction from the real goal of ending all legal abortion. Doing so would gravely damage women’s health and safety, as hundreds of thousands sought illegal abortions any way they could get one. That makes no difference to those who believe abortion is the devil’s handiwork.
In Ohio, Republican lawmakers are readying another round of legislation that would make abortion more difficult and expensive by banning telemedicine abortions. At the same time, they want the state to back a bogus “abortion reversal” process that experts say is dangerous and unworkable. If passed, the stack of medically unnecessary and medically suspect laws governing abortion in Ohio will rise. From 2011 to 2017, one-half of Ohio’s 18 abortion clinics had to close their doors because of such laws.
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One of the bills is SB 260, introduced by Republican Steve Huffman. It would ban abortions by telemedicine. It’s unknown how many abortions are performed this way in Ohio because no record is kept of what technique is used for the procedure. The way it works is by having a doctor prescribe medicine for abortion, advising the patient via videoconference. Currently, 18 states have telemedicine abortion bans and restrictions in place. Three months ago, House Republicans introduced federal legislation to prohibit telemedicine abortion. Even with a few supporting Democratic votes, that federal bill is going nowhere in the current Congress.
One clear advantage of telemedicine abortions is that they allow a patient in the many parts of the U.S. without abortion clinics to go to a health clinic where she can consult with a clinician at another location on a safe connection, get her questions answered, and be prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, the two pills used for medication abortion.
The forced-birthers claim this is unsafe and any medication abortion should only be given by a physician at a clinic or hospital. Stephanie Ranade Krider, who is vice president of the Ohio Right to Life, said, “The abortion pill is far too dangerous a drug to be dispensed remotely. "Convenience cannot outweigh the risks to women’s health and safety.”
That’s false. A study published in the peer-reviewed August 2019 journal Obstetrics and Gynecology found no difference in safety from in-clinic medication abortions and those prescribed remotely. “We know from our epidemiological data that [mifepristone’s] safer than Tylenol,” Ushma Upadhyay—an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco and a researcher for Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health who has examined the impact of Ohio anti-choice laws—told Alys Brooks at Rewire.News. “It’s not based in evidence.”
Also not based on evidence is the abortion reversal bill—SB 155—that was approved by the Ohio state senate late last year. Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oklahoma passed “abortion reversal” laws last year. These mandate that abortion providers tell patients that they can reverse an abortion if they don’t take the misoprostol after the initial dose of mifepristone. This procedure is not just medically unproven, it’s dangerous. Hayley Farless reports on a study conducted at the University of California, Davis:
The study sought to enroll 40 pregnant people who were planning to have a medication abortion and test the effectiveness of progesterone as a way to “reverse” an abortion. At the time of its conclusion, only 12 participants had enrolled. Of those, one participant who had received progesterone and two who had received a placebo experienced severe bleeding that required ambulance transport.
The discovered risk of “serious blood loss” when patients stop in the middle of the medication abortion protocol led principal investigator Professor Mitchell Creinin at UC Davis Health and his colleagues to end the study early. As a result, there remains no established scientific evidence that “abortion reversal” is possible.
As we’ve seen over the years, forced-birthers will lie to women about the physical and psychological effects of abortion, use tax money to fund bogus pregnancy crisis centers that lie to women, harass patients, make phony videos about clinic practices, fire-bomb clinics, shutter clinics for medically unnecessary reasons, assassinate clinic staff, and enact law after law after law to undermine women’s right to control their own bodies. Forced-birthers don’t give two hoots about women’s health and safety.