A new report from Alliance for Life Ontario highlights some disturbing trends with regard to the reporting of abortions, and the use and reporting of Mifegymiso, the RU486 abortion drug that was made available in Canada in 2017.
This report highlights that in the interest of protecting the abortion industry, Health Canada is failing in its duty to protect the lives and health of women and that the reporting and distribution of the abortion pill, Mifegymiso, is totally incomplete and inadequate.
The report states that “It is well known that Canada has such incomplete data collection on both surgical and medical abortion procedures that it is impossible to gauge the effect of induced abortion on women’s health.” This area of so-called women’s reproductive health is the only case where there is no legal requirement to report outcomes, including numbers or demographics, and where important information on inherent risk factors of induced abortion and pertinent facts are withheld from women who have a right to know.
Why, for instance, has Health Canada recently removed several safeguards for the use of Mifegymiso that would be in place for any other medical treatment. On their website they authorize increasing the age of gestation that Mifegymiso can be prescribed from 49 days to 63 days or nine weeks, even though they provide no testing to determine how far along the pregnancy actually is.
Mifegymiso can now be dispensed directly to patients by a pharmacist or a prescribing health professional, even if the health professional has not been trained because “health professionals are no longer required to complete an education program before they can prescribe Mifegymiso.”
The Health Canada site states, “While dialogue and information sharing between patients and health professionals is always important, the requirement for written patient consent to use Mifegymiso is being removed” and “Health professionals will no longer be required to register with Celopharma in order to prescribe or dispense Mifegymiso.”
The AFLO report found that in Ontario alone there were 45,363 prescription claims for Mifegymiso between August 10th 2017 and December 31st 2020. While the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) is supposed to be recoding these statistics, they were unable to provide explicit numbers for Mifegymiso.
There is no age of consent requirement for Mifegymiso which could mean that it is available to young girls, and there was a four-fold higher incidence of adverse reaction for the abortion pill than for surgical abortion.
As the AFLO report points out, “with each passing year data is lacking and often inaccurate. It would seem there is no other medical procedure for which incomplete data is permitted to perpetuate.”
It should be the responsibility of the provincial and federal governments to demand that reporting institutions, such as CIHI, report all demographics of every woman undergoing these procedures. If they truly care about “reproductive health”, it is high time that they stand up to the demands of the abortion lobby, stop protecting the industry and stand up for the lives and health of women.