Former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards has been taken to task for claiming abortion drugs are safer than taking paracetamol.
Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Richards was railing against an Arkansas law which provides safeguards for the prescription of abortion drugs.
The law requires that doctor administering these drugs must have a contract with another hospital doctor who can treat patients when complications arise.
Damaging
Richards said that “medication abortion is safe by all measures”, adding that it was even “safer than Tylenol”, an American paracetamol brand.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee responded to her comments, tweeting: “Rarely a person dies from reaction to painkillers but million babies a year die from abortion”.
Despite Richards’ claims, the US Food and Drug Administration has recorded 2,207 instances of when abortion drug mifepristone has damaged a woman’s health between 2000 and 2011.
This includes 14 deaths, 612 hospitalisations, 339 haemorrhages requiring transfusion, and 256 infections.
Availability
While more women have died in the US from taking Tylenol, the drug is readily available over the counter, and has been since 1955.
Writing for Life Site News, journalist Calvin Freiburger said that the length of time Tylenol has been available, and the ease of its purchase, makes the two drugs incomparable.
He said that the drug’s low regulation “allows for far more opportunities to overdose on the drug or take it in conjunction with other drugs that interact with it dangerously”.
He added: “These are precisely the sort of errors the Arkansas requirements are meant to account for.”
Award
Last week, Richards was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the pro-same-sex marriage, pro-abortion American Civil Liberties Union.
She took charge of Planned Parenthood in 2006, and under her leadership the number of abortions performed by the organisation increased by nearly 11 per cent.
When she stepped down, Hillary Clinton tweeted her 21 million followers with her thanks to Richards for her twelve years as one of the leading abortion advocates in the US.