CA Sues Faith-Based Pro-Life Pregnancy Center Over Abortion Reversal Pill - Here Are the Facts
California's attorney general is suing two major pro-life pregnancy centers to stop them from advertising abortion pill reversal services,claiming that the natural hormone used to reverse the abortion pill is "risky" and "has no credible scientific backing." But while that claim is touted by the abortion industry, pro-life doctors have refuted it with actual evidence of lives saved.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit last week against Heartbeat International (HBI) and RealOptions – two faith-based pregnancy centers.
In the 30-page complaint, Bonta alleges there is no evidence the abortion pill protocol reverses abortion or even "contributes to the continuation of a pregnancy." He also claims that the pregnancy resource centers have taken "advantage of pregnant patients at a deeply vulnerable time in their lives, using false and misleading claims to lure them in and mislead them about a potentially risky procedure."
"Those who are struggling with the complex decision to get an abortion deserve support and trustworthy guidance — not lies and misinformation," Bonta said in a statement.
But as CBN News has reported on numerous occasions, doctors who utilize abortion pill reversal say it does work and does save lives if performed in time. Click here to learn more - Reversing Regret: Procedure Stops Abortion in Progress.
The Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) website shares that there is a 64-68% success rate for woman who follow their protocol adding that "thousands of lives have been saved."
A 2018 peer-reviewed study published by Dr. George Delgado in the medical journal Issues in Law and Medicine followed 754 women who wanted to stop their chemical abortions that were already in progress. They found that 68% of women who started the reversal treatment were able to give birth to a healthy baby.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, "The California Attorney General's office does not want women to know that some chemical abortions may be safely reversed. This is a deliberate strategy to obstruct, suppress, and misinform people about abortion pill reversal."
According to RealOptions, a pregnant woman's body produces the natural hormone progesterone to sustain a pregnancy. In chemical abortions, the drug Mifepristone blocks progesterone and starves the baby to death. The abortion pill reversal protocol consists of giving extra progesterone within 72 hours after taking Mifepristone to "outnumber and outcompete" the abortion drug so the baby can survive.
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Dr. William Lile, who is board-certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology, says the progesterone given to a woman through this procedure is "bio-identical" and "as natural as it can possibly be" to what a pregnant woman produces.
He said that APRN has safely reversed Mifepristone more than 4,500 times.
Bonta's complaint attempts to discredit six studies that show progesterone has been used "routinely and safely with pregnancy since the 1950s." Instead, he cites one study that claims "95% of patients who undergo an abortion later say they made the right decision."
But as CBN News reported, a new study published in Culture, Health & Sexuality admits that abortions are grossly underreported, which means that the number of people who are willing to share that they regret that decision could be higher.
"In earlier work, we showed that fewer than half of women report abortions in surveys, which creates a huge challenge for our ability to study abortion," said Laura Lindberg, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the study.
Meanwhile, both HBI and RealOptions offer the APRN 24/7 helpline that receives more than "150 mission-critical calls" monthly from women regretting taking the abortion pill.
"Through our Abortion Pill Rescue Network hotline, we know that some women almost immediately regret their chemical abortion choice," HBI said in a statement. "These women deserve the right to try and save their pregnancies. No woman should ever be forced to complete an abortion she no longer wants."
Joshua Arnold with the Washington Stand says Bonta's lawsuit is political.
"That false narrative does nothing but pad the abortion lobby's bottom line by pressuring women to follow through with the second phase of an abortion they already regret," he wrote.
"There is no logic, no science, and, therefore, no law undergirding Bonta's lawsuit. But he did have a reason for filing it: politics," he added. "The way to be a popular—and, therefore, upwardly mobile—attorney general of California is to appease rabidly progressive constituencies, such as the abortion lobby, who want to see the legal system weaponized against pro-lifers."
In similar scenarios in other states, Illinois and Vermont have passed legislation that regulates what pregnancy centers can advertise and say, the Catholic News Agency reports.
HBI is an international network of more than 3,000 affiliated centers and clinics worldwide, and RealOptions operates a chain of five crisis pregnancy centers in Northern California.
RELATED: Pro-Life Doctor Who Helped Women with 'Abortion Pill Reversal' Vindicated by UK Medical Council
