New York City-Run Clinics To Offer Free Abortion Pills Amid Lawsuit Against ‘Dangerous’ FDA Approved Drugs

 New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that four city-run health clinics would offer free abortion pills as early as tomorrow in an outlined so-called agenda for “women’s health” across the five boroughs.

“For too long, health and health care has been centered around men,” Adams said in a news release. “If men had periods, pap smears and menopause, they would get a paid vacation. And if men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t see Congress trying to pass laws restricting abortion.”

Adams, who said the city would become the model for women’s health care, detailed in the plan that the clinics dispensing the controversial pill would join public hospitals citywide that already offer medication abortion.

The four sites combined could give away up to 10,000 abortion pills annually designed for women to dodge insurance issues and bills that they could otherwise face in hospitals.

The mayor’s announcement comes just 24 hours after nearly two dozen attorneys general sent a letter to Federal Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf urging the agency to reverse its decision to certify retail pharmacies to dispense abortion pills.

The letter argues that the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs threatens women’s health.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s decision to abandon commonsense restrictions on remotely prescribing and administering abortion-inducing drugs is both illegal and dangerous,” the letter read. “In direct contravention of longstanding FDA practice and congressional mandate, the FDA’s rollback of important safety restrictions ignores both women’s health and straightforward federal statutes.”

Such medications used to induce abortions, Mifeprex and its generic Mifepristone Tablets, are approved by the FDA for up to 10 weeks gestation, as a woman’s health risk reportedly increases after that time.

When FDA officials first approved mifepristone in 2000, the federal agency admitted that the drug could pose “serious risks for women, including infection and bleeding,” the letter pointed out.

Officials later instituted several restrictions in 2007 as part of a Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy.

In November, four national medical associations and doctors filed a lawsuit against the federal government for illegally approving chemical abortion drugs that “harm” females.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the case, accused FDA officials of “illegally” prioritizing abortion politics over science when it pushed for the legalization of the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in 2000.

The organization alleges the FDA could only authorize the drugs by characterizing pregnancy as an “illness” and arguing that these drugs provide a “meaningful therapeutic benefit.”

Lawyers further allege the federal agency never studied the drug’s safety and the potential impacts it could have on blocking hormone development in adolescent female bodies.

“Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit—they end a baby’s life and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother,” Julie Marie Blake, senior counsel of the organization, said in a news release. “The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs.”

Lawyers for the Biden administration told a federal judge Tuesday that the public would be harmed if the abortion pills were made unavailable.

“The public interest would be dramatically harmed by effectively withdrawing from the marketplace a safe and effective drug that has lawfully been on the market for twenty-two years,” the filing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk said, Fox News reported.

Since the historic overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling last summer by the Supreme Court, medication abortions have been sought after as an alternative abortion method.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than half of all “facility-based abortions” in the U.S. every year have been due to such drugs.