A new peer-reviewed scientific article is debunking the abortion industry talking point about abortion drugs being safer for patients than Tylenol.
The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute released a peer-reviewed article Tuesday in BioTech, a scientific journal, dismantling the flawed and oversimplified research behind the abortion lobby’s claim that medication abortion is safer than Tylenol and other commonly used medicines.
“For years now, the abortion lobby’s claim that abortion drugs are ‘safer than Tylenol’ has dominated public discussion, propelled by the illusion of scientific consensus,” said Cameron Louttit, director of life sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and author of the article.
“However, no such support exists. This baseless claim, repeated by medical societies, politicians, media pundits and researchers, has profoundly influenced public opinion and policy. But as this paper details, those spreading it lack the evidence they routinely claim.”
Louttit’s paper, “The Origins and Proliferation of Unfounded Comparisons Regarding the Safety of Mifepristone,” details the origins of the claim and analyzes its lack of evidence. His analysis found that there is no controlled, scientific study comparing the safety of abortion drugs to Tylenol and it would be impossible to conduct because the drugs have different functions.
Additionally, the pro-abortion talking point does not consider that the FDA’s drug safety assessments are based on other factors besides death rates. Serious adverse effects of abortion drugs, including sepsis and hemorrhages, are ignored by the misleading comparison. Beyond that, Tylenol-related deaths happen because of misuse, while the deaths from abortion drugs can happen under prescribed use.
“In collapsing complex safety considerations into simplistic comparisons that leverage wholly incomparable metrics, these assertions systematically violate the norms and regulations that inform evidence-based biomedical communication,” Louttit concludes.
“Despite this, however, they have reached both the most diffuse and influential levels of our discourse over the span of roughly two decades, buoyed by the false and dangerous perception of scientific reference and expert consensus.”
Abortion advocates argued for the safety of abortion drug mifepristone when its fate was under consideration in a high-profile court battle that ended up at the Supreme Court. The justices threw out the mifepristone case last year, ruling that a group of pro-life doctors lacked the standing to sue.
The Lozier Institute’s findings follow a bombshell study from the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center showing nearly 11 percent of women suffer from a serious adverse effect after undergoing medication abortion. The EPPC study is based on analysis of an insurance claim database with 865,727 records from 2017–23, making it a significantly larger dataset than all combined FDA-cited clinical trials put together.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressed interest earlier this month in updating mifepristone’s label to reflect the study’s findings. Kennedy also promised Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) that he would have the FDA conduct a comprehensive review of mifepristone’s safety in the wake of the EPPC study.
Chemical abortions are an increasingly common method of abortion for pregnant women, having steadily increased in usage over the past two decades. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute released data last year finding that chemical abortions made up 63 percent of all abortions in 2023, a 10 percent increase over the past three years.