U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is under fire for claiming that pregnancy is not life threatening. The Texas hard-core conservative Republican is promoting his attempt, along with 20 other GOP senators (far less than half of his caucus), to get the FDA to label a widely-accepted pill safely prescribed by doctors for decades to assist in inducing an abortion, as “dangerous.” The World Health Organization (WHO) includes Mifeprex, also known as RU-486, on its list of Essential Medicines.
“Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease,” Cruz tweeted. “Make no mistake, Mifeprex is a dangerous pill. That’s why 20 of my Republican colleagues and I are urging @US_FDA to classify it as such.”
The CDC says “about 700 women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications.”
Many responded, including many women. Some shared their experiences with pregnancy, some shared statistics showing just how dangerous pregnancy can be, some noted that Black women die from pregnancy at exponentially higher rates than white women, and some noted that Viagra is more deadly than RU-486.
Take a look:
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license