Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, recently had an interview with STAT News, where she talked about her ongoing battle to protect abortion after Roe v. Wade. And in the interview, she made a number of incredible assertions, including that abortion is “life-saving.”
Is the abortion pill safe?
McGill Johnson began by addressing the lawsuit in Texas, in which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is being sued by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of four medical organizations. These plaintiffs claim the FDA approved the abortion drugs without studying their safety first, ignored the potential side effects, and disregarded evidence of their danger.
“[W]e’re clearly very concerned, as the entire medical community should be,” she said. “It’s a very dangerous precedent. For them to have forum-shopped to a federal court where they were guaranteed to get a judge who has demonstrated a hostile viewpoint on reproductive rights — we have concerns about how our judiciary is being used.”
She then asked “why we have restrictions on a medication that is proven to be incredibly safe and effective,” insinuating that abortion pills should be available with no limits whatsoever. This is a dangerous argument to make, considering the very real dangers of the abortion pill regimen… dangers both hidden and ignored by the abortion industry.
The abortion industry already ignores FDA regulations regarding the abortion pill, putting women at further risk. Abortion facilities are promoting the abortion pill regimen for use well into the second trimester, far beyond the 10-week mark approved by the FDA. Then, when women inevitably suffer complications, they’re left to survive on their own.
Women are also advised to hide any potential complications they suffer, allowing abortion pills to continue to be marketed as safe. They have also encouraged doctors to falsify their medical reports to hide instances of complications from the abortion pill.
“Women and girls are being endangered and injured every day in our country through these dangerous chemical abortion drugs,” AAPLOG board member and CEO-elect Dr. Christina Francis told Newsmax. “I am a board-certified OB/GYN and I practice in an in-patient setting and I, personally, along with many of my colleagues, have seen women and girls come in through our emergency rooms with severe complications from these drugs. Complications that should be being addressed by the FDA. Complications like heavy bleeding and hemorrhage and the need for emergency surgery, the need for admission to the hospital for blood transfusions and infections, and even one of our members took care of a woman who likely will not be able to have children in the future because of major complications that required two major surgeries to correct these complications due to these chemical abortion drugs.”
Yet McGill Johnson wants these dangerous drugs to be completely unrestricted and unregulated?
A “non-partisan,” “life-saving” issue?
According to McGill Johnson, abortion is a non-partisan issue, and the only people who oppose it are a minority of Republicans. “This is totally a nonpartisan issue,” she said. “The Republican Party has been captured by an anti-abortion-rights minority, and that is pushing them to very extreme positions that are impacting the health and life of many people who could become pregnant.”
Yet the pro-life movement consists of far more people than the oft-mentioned “religious right.” People who fight for life are Republicans and Democrats, secular and religious, progressive and conservative. There are numerous feminist groups fighting to defend life from conception to natural death.
Furthermore, she argued that keeping abortion legal — and having abortionists who know how to commit abortions — is a matter of life and death. “[W]e’re also losing the ability of medical students and residents to learn the procedure, which for many people could be life-saving,” she said. “So we are investing in a service corps for providers, to support their development and ensure that people can also come to affiliates where they’re still able to practice that care, and intern and get residencies.”
It is true that abortion is an issue of life and death. Every single induced abortion takes a human life, and despite recent claims, the targeted, intentional killing of a preborn child is not medically necessary.
Women are not typically seeking abortions because of a medical issue; numerous reports from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research arm of Planned Parenthood, have stated that women get abortions for elective reasons, to an overwhelming degree. Women getting abortions because their lives are at risk are, in fact, incredibly rare. This continues to be true for late-term abortions, which are most commonly committed for elective reasons, and not because they are medically necessary.
Women most frequently cited issues with finances, relationship problems, or interference with school or career. While these are serious, legitimate issues, they are issues that can and should be addressed without taking the life of another human being.
Additionally, the abortion industry frequently claims that women will die without legal abortion, but this is another myth. Before Roe v. Wade, very few women were dying as a result of abortions, despite the common — and fraudulent — claim that they were. The much-publicized cases of women who allegedly needed abortions (and almost died because they didn’t receive them) are almost uniformly cases of medical neglect. Induced abortion is not the normal standard of care for pregnancy complications like pre-eclampsia or an incompetent cervix.
Alexis McGill Johnson is the president and CEO of the largest abortion chain in the country, which took the lives of approximately 3.3 million preborn humans over just one decade. It is clear that with this death toll from her organization alone over a mere 10 years that abortion is done, in nearly all cases, for elective reasons — not to ‘save lives’.
