Elizabeth Gillette was about six to seven weeks pregnant when she took the abortion pill and suffered complications: She went into labor and delivered the fetus in its amniotic sack in a bathroom surrounded by blood.
Shocked and upset, she flushed the fetus down the toilet and says she’s been left with post traumatic stress disorder.
She wants the Supreme Court to step in and protect women like herself, who was not under medical supervision while taking the drug. Ms. Gillette received the drug from an abortion clinic and took the meds at home.
The justices on Tuesday will hear arguments over the Food and Drug Administration’s changes to the distribution of mifepristone, which is used with misoprostol to terminate a pregnancy.
“I reached down and pulled out of my own body the amniotic sack — perfectly round transparent and inside was my perfectly formed baby with eyes and recognizable fingers and toes and I had to choose at that moment what to do with this baby that nobody told me I would see. They told me I would see blood, maybe just a double period,” Ms. Gillette told The Washington Times.
“I ultimately decided to flush my baby down the toilet into a septic tank, which is something that psychologically does some damage.”
It took more than a month for her to stop bleeding, and she had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic she was given due to a lack of proper medical screening, she says. To this day, Ms. Gillette suffers emotional trauma and requires a service dog.
“No matter how you feel about abortion … women like me exist. Women have found themselves on the bathroom floor just like me in pools of blood,” she said. “I really hope through this process that the Supreme Court will understand that we are here and we are suffering.”
The FDA in 2021 moved to eliminate the number of in-person doctor visits needed to obtain the drug and to allow it to be used longer into pregnancy, from seven weeks to 10 weeks. The change in gestational period had been adopted in 2016.
Tuesday’s high court case is one of the most closely watched from the Justice Department, which is appealing a lower court ruling that restricted the use of mifepristone.
The legal challenge originally was brought by pro-life medical providers represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious liberty legal group. The providers say they have seen women harmed by taking the drug.
Kellie Fiedorek, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, says the FDA violated the Administrative Procedures Act when it did away with the three required medical appointments before giving women the pill.
“Those three in-person doctor visits were required by the FDA to check women for ectopic pregnancies, severer bleeding, life treating infections and yet the FDA decided to remove all those safeguards even the last one without even adequate studies to support it and endanger women’s health and safety in doing so,” Ms. Fiedorek said. “Doctors, medical associations said, ‘Enough is enough. We have to hold the FDA accountable.’”
The feds say that the drug has been used throughout five presidential administrations and that more than half of American women who choose to end pregnancies use mifepristone.
They also argue that the medical providers lack standing to bring the lawsuit, saying their legal injuries are “speculative and attenuated.”
“Studies involving tens of thousands of women show that the serious adverse events that could give rise to the emergency situations potentially implicating respondents’ objections are extremely rare: Hospitalization, serious infections, and bleeding requiring a transfusion each occur in between 0% and 0.7% of cases,” the Justice Department wrote in its brief.
A district court ruled the pill should not have had FDA approval, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not go that far. Instead, the appeals panel said the drug could be dispensed but not through the mail as regulators had begun to allow, and only up to seven weeks into pregnancy.
The abortion pill has been available for at least two decades, but in recent years the FDA has moved to reduce the number of in-person doctor visits women would need to obtain the pill and alter the gestation period for which it could be dispensed.
The justices will consider how long the pill can be prescribed during pregnancy and whether it can be mailed as federal officials had proposed in recent administrative changes.
Meanwhile, the court rejected another case from the same group of pro-life doctors who asked the justices to review the pill’s initial FDA approval during the Clinton administration.
The drug was approved in 2000 for up to seven weeks of pregnancy, but its administration required three steps: first, a visit with a doctor to receive mifepristone, then a second one to get the drug misoprostol and finally a follow-up to address complications.
The pill has remained available during the appellate process after the Supreme Court placed the lower court ruling on hold.
Danco Laboratories, a producer of mifepristone, petitioned the high court over its production of the pill, challenging the lower court’s restrictions on its distribution.
In its court filing, Danco Laboratories’ lawyers say the suggestion that more women need emergency care after the FDA did away with in-person doctor visits isn’t supported by facts.
“The self-serving say-so of Respondents — who have never prescribed mifepristone or followed-up with patients after doing so — does not outweigh FDA’s assessment, after reviewing multiple scientific studies, that ‘alternatives to in-clinic follow-up are effective,’” their filing read.
The cases are FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories LLC v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.
They come to the justices just two years after the high court overruled Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that gave women a national right to abortion. The issue of abortion was then sent back to the states to regulate.
A recent study released by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice organization, noted that the abortion pill represented 63% of abortions last year, up from 53% in 2020. The use of the pill has increased steadily since it was first approved by the FDA but has jumped in the recent year potentially due to the Biden administration’s change in restrictions.
A decision in the abortion pill case is expected by the end of June.