One shocking drug kills extra Individuals than fentanyl. We’d like Senator Cassidy’s management
In a disappointing development this week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused Louisiana’s pleas to halt one of the biggest silent epidemics killing Americans. As the case continues at the circuit court level, national leaders raising their voices for justice have never been needed more.
On one side are manufacturers of mifepristone, a drug used in over 60% of abortions in the U.S. today – about 600,000 a year. On the other, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and a young woman who never wanted an abortion but paid a heavy price for the FDA’s bad policies anyway.
It’s Senator Bill Cassidy’s part that I most want to highlight today. One of a handful of physicians in the U.S. Senate, Dr. Cassidy is one of the nation’s most vocal advocates for protecting Louisianans and all Americans from this deadly drug scourge.
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Cassidy led more than 100 Senate and House colleagues in an amicus brief calling on the Court to stop the reckless mailing of this risky drug – without ever seeing a doctor in person – that violates Louisiana laws and puts women and children in harm’s way.
The inherent danger of mifepristone has been recognized for over two decades. It carries a “black box,” the strongest possible warning that a drug “can cause severe harm, hospitalization, or death.” Even used under perfect conditions and close medical supervision, it sends about 1 in 25 women to the emergency room. Seventy-five percent of ER visits occurring within 30 days, peer-reviewed research found, are severe or critical.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration – seizing on the Covid pandemic – decided it’s not important that women receive in-person care and scrapped this basic safeguard. In doing so, the FDA abandoned its duty and likely broke the law.
Most Americans can’t fathom this. They agree in-person visits are a safety precaution, not a burden on rights. But the insight of a physician with over 30 years in practice is especially valuable. Cassidy is appalled by the abandonment of patients in Louisiana and all over the country. There’s no substitute for a face-to-face conversation, he knows, to stop domestic violence and trafficking.
His constituent Rosalie Markezich experienced the horrific consequences personally. “I had already loved my baby, and I did not want an abortion. I told my then-boyfriend that repeatedly,” she says. But thanks to the FDA’s mail-order policy, her boyfriend was able to use her information without consent to order mifepristone from California and aggressively bullied a terrified Rosalie to take it against her will. Soon she was lying on the ground soaked in blood, her child dying. Her story is the tip of an iceberg as cases of abortion drug poisoning and coercion surface nationwide.
Markezich and the State of Louisiana sued the FDA. Lower courts so far agree that they have suffered direct harm as a result of the mail-order policy and have a strong case. They are up against single-product companies with billion-dollar bottom lines.
As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Cassidy launched an oversight investigation into abortion drug manufacturers’ practices and urged the FDA to crack down on illegal online sales of mifepristone, including websites that sell far later in pregnancy than even the FDA approves. And he has demanded answers on why, despite mounting science on mifepristone’s dangers and several deaths of young moms, the FDA decided to approve a new generic version.
The hearings he has held have exposed activist websites promoting abortion drugs to girls age 15 and younger. In one case, Attorney General Murrill testified, a 16-year-old Louisiana girl suffered a forced abortion at the hands of her abusive mother. She also wanted her baby and was excitedly planning a gender reveal – until an abortion doctor thousands of miles away in New York shipped the drugs without ever seeing her face.
The shocking fact is, mifepristone now takes more U.S. lives than fentanyl, cocaine or heroin combined. Imagine the outcry if any other drug were causing such devastation. But because abortion is involved, it got caught up in politics – with too many D.C. politicians choosing to ignore the victims and prioritize “access” at all costs.
Elected officials voting the right way on life, health and safety is a baseline. But who are the truly exceptional champions – the ones who fear no one and nothing, who relentlessly speak out and lead, who do absolutely everything in their power to hold the abortion drug racket and its enablers accountable? That’s Bill Cassidy, and for that, he more than deserves another term in the Senate.
LifeNews Note: Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
