Planned Parenthood lied to women about abortion pill dangers to boost revenue, lawsuit alleges

Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued Planned Parenthood on Wednesday for allegedly misleading women about the abortion pill’s dangers.

The abortion provider makes “brazenly false” claims about the abortion pill, mifepristone, to boost revenue, putting women at risk by suggesting it is “safer than many other medicines like penicillin, Tylenol, and Viagra,” the lawsuit alleges.

“The national Planned Parenthood organization is actively endangering the lives of women and girls across the country by spreading lies and disinformation about the powerful chemical abortion drug,” Bailey said in a statement. “The facts are clear: more than 4.5 percent of women who take this dangerous drug end up in the emergency room, yet Planned Parenthood compares it to Tylenol. This is a blatant violation of Missouri law, and I will not allow a death factory to lie to Missouri women in pursuit of its radical agenda.”

Planned Parenthood did not respond to a request for comment.

The state is seeking over $1.8 million in civil penalties, $1,000 in damages for each Missouri woman supplied pills by the organization, and reimbursement for mifepristone-related emergency care covered using taxpayer dollars, according to the release. The case claims Planned Parenthood violated the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act.

There is no evidence to support the popular claim that mifepristone is safer than Tylenol, which relies on “inappropriate comparisons” in death rates between the drugs, according to a Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) study cited in the lawsuit.

“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,” the study states. “Not only have the comparisons between mifepristone and other drugs failed in their duty to adequately assess this impossibility, but they have also demonstrated a complete disregard for the need to communicate comprehensive and truthful safety information to patients, policymakers, jurists, and the public.”

Nearly 84% of ER visits related to chemical abortions were miscoded between 2016 and 2021, according to a CLI review of Medicaid data. Medication abortions make up nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions, the Guttmacher Institute found in 2023.

Republicans blocked Medicaid funding for abortion providers like Planned Parenthood for a year in the tax and spending bill Trump signed into law July 4. A judge partially blocked enforcement of the provision after Planned Parenthood sued.

A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation in June found abortion pills can be easily ordered from some online prescribers in as little as five minutes without ever speaking to a doctor or having a current pregnancy.

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