Steven H. Aden, J.D.

In Washington, as well as elsewhere, it’s “out with the old, in with the new” as the calendar turns a new year. The 116th Congress of the United States has been retired, and the 117th Congress began yesterday, January 3, as the Senate and the House of Representatives were gaveled in. The House Democrat majority wasted no time in re-electing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and offering a new set of chamber rules designed to tighten its grip on the narrowest party margin in 100 years by limiting opposition amendments to stand-alone legislation.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recently released its Abortion Surveillance 2018 report, and the data, while less than fully reliable, suggest that the abortion rate in the country has plateaued in recent years.

Americans United for Life’s series, “(Un)Happy Birthday, Chemical Abortion,” has been taking a close look at the central claims the abortion industry makes for RU-486. Today, we come to a claim that is critically important for women, and central to its asserted legitimacy. Unfortunately, the claim doesn’t hold up on close examination. Here’s why the […]

I don’t have to tell you that 2020 has been an up-and-down year for many reasons, including challenges to Americans United for Life’s fight for the human right to life. This summer brought the Supreme Court’s disappointing decision in June Medical Services v. Russo, but we found a silver lining in the decision that suggested that brighter days were ahead. We’re happy to confirm that in the nearly half a year since June Medical, the Pro-Life Movement has been notching victories.

This week, AUL welcomed Dr. James Studnicki, Sc.D., MPH, MBA, who serves as Vice President and Director of Data Analytics for Charlotte Lozier Institute. Dr. Studnicki was most recently the Irwin Belk Endowed Chair in Health Services Research and Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte College of Health and Human Services. Prior to that, he served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and as Chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Center for Health Outcomes Research at the University of South Florida Health Sciences Center. Dr. Studnicki’s research has focused on the use of large scale databases, and associated information technology, in analyzing outcomes at the patient, hospital and community levels.

Today’s fifth installment of Americans United for Life’s reflection on the failed twenty-year experiment in legal chemical abortion continues our close scrutiny of the abortion industry’s marketing slogan, “RU-486 is an abortion pill that ends a pregnancy easily and safely.” We’ve seen that it’s not really “a pill”, but an involved process of drug dosages and medical oversight with an uncertain outcome. We’ve also seen that contrary to assurances, it fails to “end a pregnancy” a predictable percentage of the time, and surgical abortion and additional heartache and expense lie ahead for women who undergo it. Today, we’ll focus in on one word in that slogan, a word that slips by so … well, easily … that you’d almost miss it.

Although your abortionist may not tell you this, it’s important to bear in mind this built-in failure rate when considering chemical abortion, and to understand that in a predictable number of cases, it doesn’t avoid surgical abortion; in fact, it only exacerbates the known complications of abortion.

Before we huddle over our defensive strategy going forward, let’s take stock of the strong gains the pro-life movement has made over the last four years. Topping the white board has to be the presence of three new constitutionalist Supreme Court Justices nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate, resulting in a 6-3 pro-life majority. Backing them up will be an increasingly conservative judiciary, with 218 total appointments and counting. President Trump will be the first president in the modern era to fill every available court of appeals seat, a key goal for success in the courts because the federal district courts take their orders from the appeals courts.

The abortion industry would certainly like for you to think it’s an “abortion pill,” since that suggests a “magic pill” one-step process that’s easy and quick. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not a “pill”, but a difficult and sometimes risky medicalized process that involves two drugs, multiple consultations with medical providers (if they’re doing it as recommended) and inherent risks and potential complications.

Once every four years comes a day when there is only one serious topic in public discourse, and failing to address it head on is just evasion. Welcome to Election Day 2020. And since I’ve never been one to whistle past the pachyderm in the drawing room, I offer an analysis of the possible election result scenarios as I see them and their implications for the fight for the human right to life. These scenarios are likely to have a shelf life of just twenty-four hours. By this time tomorrow, three out of four of these scenarios will have proven me a liar, and maybe all four. If the Year of Our Lord 2020 has proven to be anything, it’s an exercise in Chaos Theory. But since, as we all know, “elections have consequences,” and it’s impossible to restrain the human will to prognosticate, here goes.

Pushing the FDA-imposed gestational limits for chemical abortion and the time limit for taking the RU-486 dosages, even though abortionists know doing so raises the danger level for women; disregarding the danger of refusing to properly screen for ectopic pregnancies; failing to take into account whether a patient has access to emergency care, are all par for the course for an abortion industry that seemingly cares more about its bottom line than about patient safety.

Over the next few weeks, Advocates for Life will take a hard look at chemical abortion: its genesis in France and adoption in the U.S., the known risks that caused the FDA to approve it only upon stringent conditions, and the ways in which abortion advocates are pushing increasingly dangerous risks on women for the sake of abortion access and their bottom line.