An Amsterdam-based abortionist who prescribes abortion pills to clients over the internet is suing the FDA for seizing abortion pills she illegally prescribed to U.S. patients after she violated an FDA cease and desist letter.
Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, an abortionist who once plied her trade by boat but later moved her business model to the internet and even drones, together with her lawyer Richard Hearn, filed the federal lawsuit in Idaho Monday. Gomperts claims that by cracking down on the illegal distribution of abortion pills, the government is denying women a “constitutionally protected right to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.”
Gomperts believes that the government’s enforcement of the law is “a form of intimidation that is quite severe,” according to NPR, a news organization that has published a series of reports this year apparently designed to raise questions about the FDA’s restrictions on the abortion pill. “I would say a form of bullying. And so I think it’s very important to stand up against it,” Gomperts added.
Currently, the FDA has placed mifepristone in the database (called REMS) that allows only doctors who are able to give appropriate screening and follow-up care to their patients to prescribe the abortion pill. As Live Action News has reported, removing safeguards puts women at greater risk of complications, including the risk of undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal. In addition, less regulation of the pill could make women more vulnerable to abuse, rape, and human trafficking. And a Live Action investigative series has shown that several organizations who stand to profit financially have been backing biased studies designed to build a case against the FDA’s REMS restrictions.
READ: Former FDA Commissioner wants to relax abortion pill restrictions. This is a very bad idea.
Gomperts is escalating her response to the government after the FDA sent Gomperts’ organizations, AidAccess and Women on Waves, a cease and desist letter back in March. Although Gomperts complied for a few months, in May she notified the FDA of her intent to continue her operation. The FDA has since seized packages, and Gomperts’ lawsuit claims she believes the government has blocked payments from some patients. In remarks made to the Associated Press, Gomperts’ lawyer Hearn bizarrely claimed that the FDA blocking drugs like insulin is acceptable, but “if you block a woman — or a 14- or 15-year-old girl — who only has a couple of weeks when she can take these pills and you seize them? That’s not only unconscionable, it’s unconstitutional.”
The lawsuit complains that the FDA’s restrictions are an “undue burden on the rights of U.S. women to terminate their unwanted pregnancies during the early stages of their pregnancies.” In the NPR story, Gomperts likens the abortion pill to a miscarriage and claims that “women have been dealing with miscarriages forever.”
But abortion pill advocates’ own studies on the pill’s safety assume that women are properly screened by a medical professional who can confirm a properly dated uterine pregnancy. Even according to pro-abortion organizations, medical best practice includes accurately dating a pregnancy and ruling out an ectopic pregnancy, as mifepristone is not effective for ectopic pregnancies, and missed ectopic pregnancies can be fatal. Abortion pill activists like Gomperts are defying their own logic and putting women in danger by seeking to remove the FDA’s protocols.
And since women who receive the pills are frequently instructed to lie if they have complications, it has become difficult to track the adverse effects from the pills, which have to date killed at least 24 women and injured thousands more.
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