It’s an election year. And in case you haven’t heard ad nauseum, reproductive “rights,” “freedom,” and “choice” are on the ballot. These are code words for abortion, the Harris-Walz campaign’s top policy issue. The media is doing its full court press in lockstep with every candidate who espouses the values of Big Abortion. For the past few weeks, uber left media has been taking advantage of the warm hearts of Georgians with stories of absolute heartbreaking tragedy to misinform Georgia voters about the LIFE Act (a.k.a. the Heartbeat Bill.)
The stories go like this. An absolute horrific tragedy befalls a woman who travels out of state for or “self manages” her abortion. She takes the chemical abortion pill regimen without any oversight from a physician. She experiences severe complications and dies. The blame lies with Georgia’s LIFE Act. The End.
Indeed, the articles go to great lengths to laud the safety of chemical abortion drugs and to point the finger at Georgia’s LIFE Act to distract from the fact that the Biden-Harris FDA recently allowed abortion pills to be prescribed by virtual telemedicine visits, delivered through the mail, or dispensed by your local neighborhood pharmacy.
Abortion advocates claim that the abortion pills are safter than Tylenol. When you look under the covers, you find that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration eliminated adverse event reporting of abortion pills back in 2016 once it was revealed that abortion pill emergency room visits increased 500%. For over 8 ½ years, American women have been purposely prevented from knowing how dangerous these abortion pills really are.
Georgia Life Alliance has known about the dangers of chemical abortion which is why, in 2021, GLA worked with Georgia’s Labor Commissioner, then Senator, Bruce Thompson, who championed the Women’s Health and Safety Act through the Senate. Once in the House, the bill made its way through committee but did not pass by end of session.
These articles and the media’s complicity have done Georgia’s pro-life movement a great service. They have proven and highlighted the dangers of the abortion pill regimen and the need for the Georgia General Assembly to get the Women’s Health and Safety Act over the finish line. This bill restores health safety standards by codifying the common-sense protections previously required by the FDA and upheld by the Supreme Court before the FDA and Planned Parenthood became political arms of the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Administrations.
While we still don’t have (the required) reporting by the Georgia Department of Public Health of number of abortions in 2023, preliminary data provided by DPH to GLA showed that the overall abortion rate is down in Georgia by approximately 27%, from 39,397 in 2022 to 28,649 in 2023. That is news to celebrate for sure. The same data shows that 83% of abortions in Georgia are chemical abortions, a full 20 points higher than the national average of 63% in 2023.
Make no mistake, the Biden-Harris Administration, in cahoots with the abortion industry, know that pro-life laws work. That is exactly why they are working hard to normalize chemical abortion, recklessly expand abortion access, and undermine Georgia’s LIFE Act while jeopardizing women’s health and safety to do it.
Our society has moved to one where the people take no personal responsibility for their behavior, their actions, their choices, or even for their own safety. It reminds me of a poem William Wordsworth wrote called November 1806 in which he says,
“from this day forward we shall know
That in ourselves our safety must be sought;
That by our own right hands it must be wrought;
That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low.”
Until we restore our culture so that we live by our nation’s first principles which includes self-control, we will need laws like the Women’s Health and Safety Act. It is high time we pass this protective measure. Join Georgia Life Alliance in our efforts to see this through in the 2025 General Assembly session.
Claire Bartlett is the executive director of the Georgia Life Alliance
