VP Kamala Harris Calls Efforts to Prevent Access to Abortion Drug ‘An Attack on the Very Foundation of Our Public Health System’

(CNSNews.com) – Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that pro-life efforts to prevent access to the abortion drug mifepristone amounts to “‘an attack on the very foundation of our public health system.”

Furthermore, she suggested that such an effort could lead to medications needed to “alleviate suffering and prolong the quality of life” no longer being available.

Harris said that since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, “we have seen strategic attempts and attacks through so-called leaders, in particular in the states — extremist so-called leaders who are attempting to, and in some — in many cases, have passed laws that will further restrict the ability of people to make the most fundamental decisions they should have the power and ability to make about their lives and the future of their families.”

During a White House meeting on “access to reproductive health care,” she said that since the Dobbs decision, “we are now in a situation where there is an attempt to further attack fundamental rights to healthcare, in that there is an attack that has been placed against the ability of — of doctors to prescribe and for people to receive medication to allow them to make decisions about their reproductive health.”

“That medication is called mifepristone. It is a drug that is used to perform medication abortion,” the vice president said.

“It is FDA approved and was approved 20 years ago, after a strenuous peer-reviewed process of determining that it is safe and appropriate for its intended use, but there are now partisan and political attacks attempting to question the legitimacy of a group of scientists and doctors who have studied the significance of this drug,” Harris said.

“There is now an attempt by politicians to remove it from the ability of doctors to prescribe and the ability of people to receive,” she said.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, a coalition of pro-life doctors are suing the FDA and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, arguing that the agency failed to abide by its legal obligations “to protect the health, safety, and welfare of women and girls” when it authorized the use of chemical abortion drugs in the U.S. and “eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant women and girls who undergo this dangerous drug regimen.”

They argue that the Biden administration’s directive to allow delivery of the abortion drug through the mail is “violation of federal law,” and the FDA “never had the authority to approve these drugs for sale” in the first place.

Meanwhile, a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general are suing the Food and Drug Administration, accusing the agency of excessively regulating the abortion pill mifepristone.

On Friday, the vice president convened a meeting to “talk about what we will do to highlight this issue to make sure the people of America are aware of what is happening, and so we can make sure that the people of America are protected in terms of us fighting for their rights to have access to the medication that they need.”

Twenty-two state attorneys general wrote to the FDA and threatened to enforce state laws that might prevent millions of women from accessing medication that is prescribed by their doctor and the medication their doctor determined is important to their health and wellbeing.

Again, this is not just an attack on women’s fundamental freedoms; it is an attack on the very foundation of our public health system, and I might note that most Americans could look in their medicine cabinet, where they will find medication prescribed by a doctor that they use on a daily basis and have available to them because the FDA engaged in a process of determining the efficacy and safety of that medication.  

Mifepristone is no exception to that process, and so those who would attack this process and the ability of the FDA to make these decisions ought to look in their own medicine cabinets to figure out where they’re prepared to say that those medications that they need to alleviate suffering and to prolong the quality of life should no longer be available to them, because that is what we are talking about.

And so we will, together, do the work that we need to do. The president has been very clear that we are committed to protecting every woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and her own future, and that all people in our country should have that freedom and liberty.

From CNSNews - READ ORIGINAL

Some media, including videos, may only be available to view at the original.