Op-Ed: The Culture of Death and its lies
World
By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
There is now irrefutable evidence the abortion pill isn’t “safe”— and our government must take action.
Can a revolution come down to a pill? Over the past century, tidal waves of moral revolution have transformed society and reshaped our moral landscape. Two of those revolutions were delivered as pills, and both pills were aimed against pregnancy and the gift of life. The first, now known simply as “The Pill,” came as oral birth control. That pill delivered the sexual revolution on a platter, liberating the act of sex from the gift of procreation. The subversion of marriage and the glorification of both adultery and premarital sex could not have happened without the pill. That pill promised instant medicalized freedom from the “risk” of pregnancy.
The second pill is the abortion pill, developed a generation later. Most specifically, medicalized abortion by pills became possible with the development of mifepristone by drug maker Roussel Uclaf of Fance. Mifepristone, generally known in the United States as Mifeprex, causes the woman’s body to reject and expel the unwanted pregnancy. From the beginning, pro-abortion forces in the United States saw great opportunity in that pill. Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the drug only under certain conditions. The pregnancy had to be in its early weeks, an authorized physician had to prescribe it, the pill had to be administered in an authorized clinical setting, and the doctor had to confirm that the pregnancy was in its early weeks and that there was no ectopic pregnancy.
Pro-abortion advocates worked overtime to liberalize these rules and make the pill widely available—just as had been done with the birth control pill. Fast forward and the landscape changed with the arrival, for example, of the pandemic. With office visits made more difficult under pandemic protocols and with prescriptions by mail instantly made necessary, abortion advocates saw their chance. They put pressure on the FDA to lift restrictions on mifepristone prescriptions, and under the Biden administration, key restrictions and directives were lifted. Then came the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022, reversing Roe v. Wade and returning the abortion question to the states—at least the question of surgical abortions, such as take place in abortion clinics.