Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan showed little care for victims of forced abortions on Wednesday when she accused her Republican colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee of “gaslighting” Americans on the dangers of mail-order mifepristone and claimed violence against pregnant women is a “longstanding part of human history.”
The GOP senators who called the hearing titled Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs spent much of their two hours invoking an uptick in coerced pill-induced abortions as one of the many reasons the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should restore the mifepristone safeguards stripped by the Biden administration, such as an in-person doctor visit.
Hassan immediately took issue with evidence that mifepristone has put women and their babies at immense risk of harm by claiming that “women have been coerced before mifepristone, and they have been coerced since mifepristone.”
“The murder rate, the assault rate on pregnant women by their partners to end a pregnancy has been a longstanding part of human history,” Hassan said. “So to blame it on mifepristone misses the point. To say that women shouldn’t be able to get this medication through the mail misses the point.”
Hassan’s “point” centered on accusing pro-life states and their lifesaving policies of creating “maternal health and reproductive health deserts in this country.”
“When you say a woman should go consult with a physician, there are women who would have to travel hours in this country, miss work, find a babysitter — if they have a car to begin with — in order to do that, because of policies that have banned abortion and have cut Medicaid in particular,” Hassan continued.
What she accidentally admitted instead is a fact pro-lifers have recognized for decades: The unlimited abortion-for-all culture that the Democrat party and their abortion activist allies have tried to force on Americans has undoubtedly weakened the safeguards designed to protect women and their babies from harm and abuse.
Contrary to what Hassan said, there are no laws preventing women from getting routine female treatment and pregnancy healthcare — including via telemedicine. There are, however, plenty of examples of women in states that banned mifepristone who allegedly suffered serious complications or heavy bleeding after ingesting the mail-order abortion pills, sometimes against their wills.
Democrats’ abortion extremism, paired with the Biden administration’s radical rollback of abortion pill dispensing requirements have only made women more susceptible to the injuries and even death that can come after downing mifepristone without medical supervision.
Recent abortion pill poisoning reports and lawsuits suggest that abusers and other bad actors use relaxed mail-order abortion drug provisions to force mifepristone on pregnant women. Already, approximately 70 percent of abortions are believed to be unwanted, coerced, or inconsistent with the mother’s values and desires.
As hearing witness Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill noted in her testimony, states like hers can only do so much to prevent coerced abortions when Democrats have repeatedly enabled and shielded the illegal trafficking of abortion pills to people in areas where they are banned. Until the mifepristone guardrails that stood before Biden’s time in the White House are at least reinstated, Murrill said, “Louisiana’s efforts to protect mothers and their unborn children and to hold out-of-state abortion pill traffickers accountable for the harm they inflict will be all but futile.”
Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
