GARRETT RILEY: The Missing Truth In “Choice” — Why Chemical Abortion Demands New Scrutiny

GARRETT RILEY: The Missing Truth In “Choice” — Why Chemical Abortion Demands New Scrutiny

by | May 29, 2025 | Opinion

By Garrett Riley |

For decades, the rallying cry of “choice” has driven the abortion debate. Pro-abortion advocates paint it as a matter of personal liberty — a private decision between a woman and her doctor. But real choice demands full, honest information. And the latest evidence on chemical abortion reveals a disturbing truth that’s been hidden for too long.

A massive new study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, analyzing over 865,000 chemical abortions from 2017 to 2023, shows that 1 in 9 women who take the abortion pill suffer serious medical harm. That’s nearly 11% of women dealing with severe complications like hemorrhaging, sepsis, and infection — consequences that can lead to permanent damage, emergency surgeries, or even death. Another 5% need additional medical interventions, exposing the pill’s failure rate.

For anyone who claims to care about women’s well-being, these numbers demand immediate action. For the government agencies that regulate drugs and healthcare, they require urgent oversight. And for those who genuinely believe in the “pro-choice” principle, they demand a clear-eyed rethinking of what real, informed choice means.

Choice Without Truth Isn’t Choice

“Choice” means nothing without accurate information. The abortion pill has been spun as “safer than Tylenol,” but that’s a blatant lie. The FDA’s official label for mifepristone claims a serious adverse event rate of less than 0.5% — over 22 times lower than what the real-world data proves.

No one can make a good decision if key facts are hidden. In any other area of medicine, these numbers would trigger an immediate recall or at least a thorough review of safety guidelines.

When the FDA fast-tracked the abortion pill in the 1990s, it was with a promise: that safety standards would be rigorously upheld. Today, those standards in Arizona— like mandatory ultrasounds, in-person exams, and physician oversight — are being threatened and have been stripped away in other states by abortion-rights legislation.

The result? A pill once administered under a doctor’s care is now shipped through the mail, often with no medical oversight. No follow-up exams. No real informed consent. Women facing vulnerability—particularly those under the coercion of abusive partners—are exposed to severe risks affecting both their physical and mental well-being.

Pills That Kill: Medicine Turned Upside Down

Abortion advocates call the pill “medication abortion,” as if it heals. But real medicine heals. Chemical abortion does none of that. It destroys innocent unborn children and puts women’s health at risk.

Calling abortion “medicine” is a dangerous lie.  True medicine doesn’t harm or kill. No one who truly believes in women’s health can honestly call this “medicine.”

The original “safe, legal, and rare” mantra has vanished. Chemical abortions now make up 63% of all abortions in the United States — and in some states, as high as 80%. Each pill dispensed means more danger for women — not less.

We’ve gone from “safe, legal, and rare” to “dangerous, deregulated, and widespread.” That’s a betrayal of women — and of the very idea of healthcare.

This Is About Women’s Health, Not Politics

This isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about whether women can truly make informed choices. It’s about whether agencies like the FDA and HHS will honor their mission to protect the public — or cave to ideological pressure.

If you believe in choice, you must also believe in full, honest information. Anything less isn’t choice — it’s propaganda.

If you believe in human rights, you must recognize every human life’s inherent worth — and the dignity of every mother’s health and future.

If you care about healthcare safety, you can’t ignore these numbers. You must demand a full review of the abortion pill’s safety — and an end to the lies that have kept women in the dark for far too long.

Read the full EPPC report here.

Arizona Life Coalition Stands with Women’s Health

The Arizona Life Coalition, along with more than 100 pro-life organizations, has urged the FDA to act on this alarming evidence and reinstate the safety standards that once protected women. You can read that letter here.

What Can We Do?

We must ensure that every woman facing a crisis pregnancy has support and the truth — not abortion industry spin.

Demand that the FDA and other agencies incorporate this evidence into their safety evaluations. Share this information with your family, friends, and public officials. Urge them to reinstate common-sense safety standards. Push for a full review of a pill that seriously injures 1 in 9 women.

Medicine is meant to heal — not to harm and kill. Any healthcare policy or practice that does otherwise has no place in a just society.

Garrett Riley is the executive director of the Arizona Life Coalition, with a mission of inspiring pro-life choices through charity, education, and unifying collaboration.

Beware Those Who Intentionally Use Words To Lie

Beware Those Who Intentionally Use Words To Lie

by | Feb 16, 2024 | Opinion

By Dr. Thomas Patterson |

The word “liberal” was once considered a compliment. It meant fair, principled, and thoughtful. The Age of Enlightenment was birthed by “classical liberals” with their then-fantastical notions about government by consent of the governed, legal equality of all, and individually owned rights.

Later as ideologies like collectivism and class oppression gained favor among the intelligentsia, the word “liberal” was hijacked and mangled beyond recognition. It was used to describe almost anything from well-meaning do-gooders to hard-bitten class warriors, from big government socialists to tyrants who silence and ostracize their opponents, for the good of society.

With time, “liberal” lost favor. When the label became a political epithet, Leftists dropped it like a hot potato, moving on to “progressive” as their new favorite label, even though “socialist” and “Marxist” are also accurate.

Here’s the point: in the unceasing war of democratic persuasion we call politics, what you say often matters less than how you say it and the phrasing you use. Somehow, the Left always seems ahead in the game of word messaging.

Take abortion. Since the heyday of the eugenics movement, Democrats have generally been for abortion and Republicans not. The two sides were labeled pro-abortion and pro-life.

Eventually Democrats, realizing that “pro-abortion” was off-putting to many, changed their label to “pro-choice” which made the decision to terminate a pregnancy seem more like a normal consumer transaction. “Pro-life” came to mean that Republicans demanded all babies must be carried to term.

Most Americans are abortions centrists, willing to support legal abortion up to 12 weeks or so. Yet Gallup polls reveal that 60% of “pro-choice” Democrats believe abortion should be legal at any time until the moment of birth, while less than a quarter of “pro-life” Republicans believe all abortions should be prohibited. Thus the Left, by the adroit use of labels, is able to obscure the fact that their views on abortion are much further from the mainstream than are Republicans’.

“Racist” might be the most abused word in the language. During the civil rights movement, there was a broad consensus that “racism” meant the practice of judging fellow humans by their skin color rather than by the “content of their character.”

But even as race relations broadly improved, for race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, that definition wasn’t good enough. They denied that color blindness was a positive goal in itself. They insisted instead that racial identity was our defining, inherent attribute that explained virtually all human behavior.

In support, the media and the Left subtly changed the language around racial equality. Equality before the law is a precious right bequeathed to all Americans under the Constitution. As a substitute, the Left devised a new definition for “equity,” now meaning equality of outcomes, a supposedly superior goal that assures permanent employment for the professionals in the field.

Nevertheless, the SAT, welfare reform, legitimate law enforcement, and anything smacking of merit were all deemed racist. Consequently, today the charge of “racism” has lost much of his coherence. “Playing the race card” is recognized as being bereft of real arguments for your point. Worse, if all racial discrepancies are blamed on “racism,” then the hard work of addressing the real causes of racial inequality can be deflected.

Institutions typically don’t like to admit that they use gender and racial discrimination in personnel decisions. Rather than come clean about their practices, however, they adopted the term “affirmative action” which did exactly the same thing. A majority of Americans are neither fooled nor amused.

There is obviously a world of difference between the legal immigration that has nurtured and defined America and the tsunami of lawlessness now plaguing us. Yet media commentators use “immigrant” to describe lawbreakers and lawful immigrants alike, as if only bigots believe there are real differences.

Finally, congressional bills are often given intentionally deceptive names. The Inflation Reduction Act was a recent laughable example. The bill was actually a package of green subsidies still chasing the climate chimera and other outrageous handouts that had zero possibility of reducing inflation.

Words can be powerful tools in the pursuit of truth or falsehood. Classical liberals should call out those who deliberately use words to lie.

Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.