ACLJ Files FOIA After Biden Admin Cites COVID-19 in Its Reversal of Pro-Life Rule in Order To Allow Abortion Pill To Be Sent Through the U.S. Mail

By 

Olivia Summers

|
June 14, 2021

5 min read

Pro Life

A

A

Next time you see your local mail carrier, ask them if they know they might be assisting in abortions.

It sounds absurd and will likely throw them for a loop, but thanks to President Biden, any given envelope they’re sliding into a mailbox could contain abortion pills. We just took action to expose why the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce life-saving pro-life regulations in order to make this possible.

We told you how President Biden’s new Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Xavier Becerra (when he was Attorney General of California), pressured the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expand access to RU-486, also known as the abortion pill, during the Coronavirus pandemic. Numerous pro-abortion-run states demanded that the FDA relax its drug safety standards that regulate medications with serious safety concerns and allow the abortion pill to be prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to women.

At that time, we sent our own letter to HHS outlining the dangers of the unsupervised dispensing of the abortion pill and pointing out that, of all times, the COVID-19 pandemic was the wrong time to deregulate this dangerous drug.

Just as we feared, President Biden suspended enforcement of the rule that required medicated abortions and abortion pills be administered under the supervision of a doctor. Now, unless a state has passed a law saying otherwise, they can be delivered by request through the mail without any medical supervision whatsoever – conscripting the U.S. Postal Service into the abortion industry.

Even now, as America is finally beginning to reopen and both infections and deaths are on the decline, the Biden Administration is still USING COVID-19 as an excuse to expand abortion.

Clearly, this poses a danger to unborn babies, but it also jeopardizes the health and safety of countless women under the guise of protecting them with COVID rules. As we told you before:

Eliminating the requirement of an in-person visit with a doctor and an ultrasound and allowing the abortion pill to be administered unsupervised only serves to further endanger women. However, that’s exactly what the FDA has now done. In a letter dated April 12, 2021, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) announced that it “intends to exercise enforcement discretion during the COVID-19 [pandemic] with respect to the in-person dispensing requirement.”

“Enforcement discretion” means that the CDER is now allowing abortion providers to dispense the abortion pill through telemedicine and mail.

For all of his talk on the campaign trail about protecting women’s health, with this move, President Biden may have actually increased the danger to it. But this Administration is beholden to Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby. After all, the abortion giant pledged millions to pro-abortion politicians during the 2020 elections, including President Biden himself. Now it seems he’s making good on that investment, expanding access to abortion on demand, regardless of the risks. In just his first six months, President Biden already appears on track to become the most pro-abortion President in U.S. history.

As we already reported:

In just the first few weeks of his presidency, President Biden, through Executive order, revoked the Mexico City Policy – a Reagan-era rule that President Trump expanded and renamed Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) – and is now allowing U.S. tax dollars to be given to overseas abortion providers.

Just recently we told you our legal team testified in support of a Maryland House Bill that would regulate the administration of similar abortion pills. At that time, we pointed out that “according to the FDA, as of 2018, the chemical abortion pill has taken more than 3.7 million preborn lives, caused 24 maternal deaths, and resulted in at least 4,195 reported adverse maternal reactions.”

But it is abundantly clear that Planned Parenthood and abortionists don’t care about protecting women’s health at all. All they care about is profit and expanding the bottom line. Thanks to the Biden Administration, now they can make money through the mail with postal carriers as their unwitting couriers.

Suspending the rule is not about protecting women’s healthcare either. That’s why the ACLJ just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Biden FDA and HHS to expose the deceptive and dangerous intent behind this move.

We are demanding all records from the FDA regarding the reversal of the rule, as stated in our FOIA:

This Request seeks records from the FDA regarding its “literature search for studies pertinent to the in-person dispensing requirement in the Mifepristone REMS Program” and its review of the “postmarketing adverse events that reportedly occurred from January 27, 2020 – January 12, 2021, with mifepristone use for medical termination of early pregnancy,” and the FDA and/or HHS decision to permit the use of mifepristone without medical supervision. The purpose of this request is to seek information that will then educate the American public about the FDA and HHS’s oversight, considerations, practices, and procedures in its approval of, and spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars on, “medical termination of early pregnancy.”

We will expose exactly why the Biden Administration feels that making abortions even more accessible is a higher priority than protecting the health and safety of women. And if they do not respond to our FOIA, we will escalate with legal action, filing a lawsuit in federal court if necessary.

This article was co-written by ACLJ Senior Counsel John Monaghan.