Host Brendan O'Connell interviews guest Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D, about the state of abortion in America, the amount of abortions since the overturn of Roe, the risks of mifepristone, the Turnaway study, abortion pill reversal, & more.
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Life Matters
The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio@bnnmedia.org. Hello, welcome to Life Matters. I'm your host, Brendan O'Connell. Well, we have a distinguished guest with us today who got a PhD from Georgetown University, and I got a BSBA from Georgetown University. So it's a Georgetown Hoya interview, but far beyond that to the public. We want to welcome Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon. We'll welcome Dr. O'Bannon. Good to be with you, Brendan. Randall, what's the state of affairs regarding abortion in America these days? Well, as I think most of your viewers would know, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In the sense that because of Dobbs, because of Rose Fall, a number of states have been able to put in place protections for unborn children, and we know that there have been babies and wives that have been saved as a result of that. At the same time, there are states which have sort of retrenched and really given support to and encouragement to their abortionists. They have not only helped to either to encourage, in some cases, even pay for, abortions in their state, but they have advertised and sought patients from other states who might be coming from some of those states where there are protections in place for unborn children. As a consequence, it looks like that maybe it's, some numbers show that there are actually more abortions now than there were a couple of years ago. I'm not entirely sure that those are perfectly reliable, partly because they're using different methods to count those now, relying on estimates, specifically from people that have a vested interest in promoting this, and wanting people to know that they are still performing abortions. But it's possible that they could be up a little bit. And that's not a good thing, that's something that's concerned us greatly. But you should know that abortions were rising before Roe was overturned, before Dobbs had been going up, and the main reason they'd been going up, we believe, has been the promotion and heavy use of abortion bills with a lot more per stone and is a process. And as those have grown, they have become a huge part of what abortion is in America. I think people used to think, when they think of abortion, they would think in terms of maybe a surgical abortion, just going into a clinic, an operating table, and so forth. That still happens, specifically in some of those states that are supporting abortion. But increasingly, it's the case that most abortions in the United States are, in fact, done with the abortion bill, done with Miffa Pristo. And the abortion industry tries to say that the abortion pill, Miffa Pristo is safe, yet I think more and more women are going to the emergency room. Do you know any statistics in that regard, or is it, is it as safe to use that term? Oh, it's never been safe, it's always been problematic. Obviously, first, to everybody understand, usually when a woman takes an abortion bill, everybody dies. Usually that's the child, but it shouldn't surprise people to understand that once you take a drug like that, it also puts the mother's life at risk. And we know, even from limited statistics that are available from the FDA, which we're not sure if they get even 10% of the reports of things happen, but we know that they have found that there have been more than two dozen. And have died, I think it was something like 30 something in the latest count. And meanwhile, also that thousands of women have ended up in the, in hospitals and emergency rooms dealing with bleeding issues, dealing with infections, some of which have proven deadly. There have been, because it's, it's hard to distinguish the symptoms of a chemical abortion from a rupturing, ectopic pregnancy, women have had that happen and didn't get to hospitals in time to deal with it because they thought they were just having a chemical abortion. But there have been thousands of cases of those. So it's, it's quite dangerous. We know that it has a significantly high failure rate, and especially when we've seen statistics from foreign countries where they don't have the sort of limitations on data gathering that we do in the United States, the numbers of women who have ended up in the emergency room or maybe like 10%, more than 10% Canada have seen higher numbers for places in Europe and so forth. And the abortionists want you to think that those are, that just, that act like they either don't exist or act like that's not a big deal. It is a big deal when a one in 10 or one in one in five who take your pill are going to end up in the emergency room and are wondering if they're going to bleed to death. That, that's a serious problem. But the abortion industry and currently the current administration in Washington does seem to be troubled by that. They seem to be more concerned with trying to please these abortion groups that want to expand the use of abortion pills even further. And they're going into drug stores and I think they have mail in abortion, if a post on from out of the country and how does one track that or find out are we being inundated with Miffer-Pristone and how it's, how do we resolve this issue? It is a difficult, it is a difficult issue. It just is and people don't understand what a Pandora's box that it was that Biden and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris opened when they, they authorized people to begin to sell these online or to ship these online pharmacies. And now we'll talk a minute, I guess about the drug store, retail drug stores that are offering it. But the point is, is that yes, there, there have been these, these abortion pills which are made in places like India or China that are being shipped to the United States. They have not been cut, they're not, they've not, these companies have not been inspected by the FDA, their procedures, their, the purity of their, their pills and so forth, the particular whether they're the right dosage or so forth. And often they come to the United States through these long roundabout ways to sort of keep them from being tracked. And they may even come without any instructions about how to use them. So they're just a very dangerous sort of situation that comes on. After the Trump administration, the FDA actually issued a letter which was telling, well, one, one of the main groups called eight access headed by former Greenpeace actress named Rebecca Thompers warning her that she was not be selling these drugs, or shipping these drugs to the US because they had not been approved by the, the FDA. But pretty much since Biden's come on, that's been ignored now. How many of them are there? It, I'm afraid it's hard to tell because we don't have a way of tracking those shipments. What we have to rely on is what a gompert or, or eight access or some of these other groups say about how many pills they're shipping. And even if they're being honest about those numbers, it still, still doesn't give us an exact number of women are using them because they, women may be buying them and not using them and maybe using them and then change their minds and trying to reverse those, those abortion pills. They may be buying them for somebody else. They were even urging them at some point to, to buy these in bulk and sort of stock them in the medicine gap. So how many, so how many pills fit in each of those categories? We don't know. We just know the numbers that they've been saying, and they've been reporting high numbers. But again, I don't know whether they're honest. Don't know exactly how meticulous they are in keeping records. They don't seem to be that meticulous and sort of keeping track of their patients. So I'm not sure. They seem to be more interested in reporting numbers of sales to boost their ventures rather than they are to do anything on behalf of the sake of women and certainly not for their unborn children. I think here in Massachusetts, the governor, the female governor that we now have bought a bunch of the pills shortly after the Dodd's decision. So I mean, I'm wondering if they're considered counted or not counted as, you know, an abortion. Right. One of the things I- Very good question. Go ahead. No, that's, you said that's a very good question. That's, that's just one of the fundamental problems in trying to track and see what the numbers are. And then when you get people reporting how many abortions there have been in the United States in the last couple of years, what do you do with those numbers? Do you just take them for granted or do you, you question them? Do you question them? How do you have come up with an alternate number? There's, it's really difficult. We do know, however, that they are definitely out there promoting these bills and selling them to women all across the country. Now, abortion pill reversal has become a threat for the abortion industry because it could save lives after the woman has taken Miffer-Pristone. And what, do you see abortion pill reversal? The other side has been besmirching abortion pill reversal. And I think they use something called a turn-away study. What is that study and do they really have a right to? Are they correct in saying that abortion pill reversal is safer than birth or abortions are safer than birth? There's a bunch of different things. It's something that the, the, the proportion side has been saying for years as far as abortion being safer than birth. And they get that from data that they have, they have culled and cultivated themselves here in the U.S. again, that one of the problems that we have in the United States is that because we don't have a, a nationalized health care system where we, where patients encounters and, and the services or the different sorts of things that are, are, are counted in a very formal fashion. We rely on the people who work at the abortion clinics to crack and tell us how many abortions that they performed. And it's only as good as information that they give us. So lifers don't necessarily have access to that data because we obviously don't run clinics like that and don't perform the sort of terrible things that they do. But in other countries where they have more careful information where they track every patient encounter because they got nationalized health care systems, that's just the case. We know that when they've actually done studies of women who've had abortions versus women who've had birth versus women who've just maybe not had, have haven't either, that the women who have given birth had a, had the highest survival rate. Women who had abortions were the ones who had the higher death rates than all the rest. That's just, that's what you get when you actually do, you do actual real scientific studies. Like they did in Finland, you can look those up and see for yourself. It is the case that childbirth is safest. What are all the reasons for that? Maybe it's just because the women who are giving birth tend to be more careful with their health. I don't know. But the point is that's what the data really says. So that's the case for that. Now the turnaway study, the turnaway study is studied done by a group out of, you know, first California, San Francisco, which took a number of women who had showed up to abortion clinics who had in mind to get an abortion and they sort of separated them into groups. The ones who just were having early abortions, the ones who were right close to their particular limit at the clinic as far as how many weeks along they could be and those who were over the limit and supposedly were not allowed to have abortions or their term is denied abortions who then either went someplace else to get those or ended up deciding to have the baby. They had made a lot out of that study. They've claimed that it shows the abortion is safer. That women who have abortions are better off financially. They achieve more life goals. But there's a whole, whatever it is, they claim that women who have the abortions are better off than those who were denied abortions. Well, there's a number of problems with that study, which I won't have time to get into here. But suffice to say, part of what's going on here is that it's a very selective sample. You took women who were very much abortion minded, who had planned their lives and their futures, specifically around getting that abortion, and then they asked them after they found out they couldn't get abortion, how they felt about that. Well, at that point, they were obviously upset because they didn't know what they were going to do and they didn't know how they were going to get by. Is that an objective sample? I mean, should you do that or should you simply take all pregnant women and decide what happens when they choose abortion versus whether they choose life? That would be a more careful thing. But here they were focused on obviously this sort of denials. But even though when you took their data, you found out that if the women who were supposedly denied abortions, when you checked with them about a year or so later, only about 5% were thinking that abortion was the right answer for them. If they had come to terms with their having a child, they had decided that the better decision was, I guess, to have the child and they were happy to be with that child. So it really just a matter of the way they did their survey, the way they asked their questions and so forth. How big was the sample size of that study? Was it not only like 10 or 12 people? Oh, no, no. When you're talking about the turnaway study, the turnaway study is a couple of thousand or something. A couple of women. What you might be thinking of is the study by Mitchell Crennan. Mitchell Crennan is an abortionist who did a study actually from the same school, University of California in San Francisco, where he was supposedly testing the theory about whether you could reverse abortion pills or not. He did a study and he said, "I'm going to find out whether or not this really worked." Because they had been claiming that the studies that had been done before had not been large enough, had not been careful enough, and that they said if you did a real study, they claimed that they thought that it would show that doing nothing was just as good as having an injection, a special injection, or taking a progesterone to try to stave off or reverse the abortion. He did his study, I think it was like 2018, 2019, and he famously got 12 women to come into a study. He was planning to get 40, but when he got to number 12, he said he had had three of his 12, had ended up in the hospital with bleeding problems, and that he was just too awful and too dangerous and he wasn't going to continue the study. So it went out there as if he had done a study and found out that these don't work. If you actually look at what his results were, what actually happened was he had two groups that he was looking at. He was looking at some who got a boost to progesterone, six of them got a boost to progesterone, and six got nothing, got a placebo. And of those three women who had bleeding problems, two were from the placebo group. In other words, they got them for first stone, and then they didn't get anything else. Two of those, yes, they had serious bleeding problems and they needed surgery to deal with the bleeding. There were significant problems, significant complications among two of those women who followed the advice that a lot of the abortion advocates have been saying saying, "You don't need to take a progesterone boost, just take the micropristone and then don't do anything and it'll work itself out." Following that advice got two of them in the hospital with severe bleeding episodes. Now that other woman who was in the group that actually did get the progesterone boost, she did have some bleeding, but it actually resolved without her needing any surgery or anything like that. And the fact that women bleed from a methepristone, from chemical abortions, that's nothing new. That's always been the case. Now was hers just a little bit later or something like that? The point is she didn't really have a significant complication. Here's the rub. When you actually looked at the data of the women who went through that study, the numbers of women who had the progesterone boost, it was like 80% of those actually, it worked. It kept the baby alive through the period of time while they were examining. Of the women who did nothing, only about four out of the, I'm sorry, it was two out of the five that actually were still alive at that point. So what it showed was, first of all, that abortion pill reversal worked. That's what his data that the, again, this is an abortion advocate. His data showed that abortion, that the abortion pill reversal worked, and it showed that it wasn't that abortion pill reversal, it did not show it'd be dangerous. What was dangerous was following the advice of the abortion advocates who said, you can just take the methepristone and then do nothing. They were the ones who had the serious problems, who ended up in the hospital, who needed the extra help. So the message that should have come from that result is that abortion pill reversal works, that it's safe, and that it is effective. So that's the real message there. That's not one you'll get from the press, and it's not one you'll get from abortion advocates who are anxious to do anything they can to make this, to discourage women from accessing this when they have second thoughts and change their minds. Well, it's abortion pill reversal catching on throughout the country. Distribution systems are coming about. I do know that there, I do know that there are people who have trained, have been trained in it all across the country. There is a website, I think it's a worship-overversal.org or something where people can find out information. I think because of the way that it has been portrayed in the media in the press, not enough people know about it yet, it's not something that abortion clinics are going to tell women. It's not something that Rebecca Gompert's that are aid-access people are going to tell people about or all these groups that are shipping and selling abortion pills online. They're not telling them about it. But when women do hear about it, when they're aware that it's possible, women do access it. Trying to remember the latest figure I heard was a four or five thousand successful reversals. That may have been a couple of years old, but it's certainly out there. It's certainly happening. There are thousands of babies who are alive today who I do not think would be if it were not for abortion-overversal and these brave doctors and pro-life pregnancy centers which are out there making this known and available to women. Now where do you see the future? I know there was a bill passed in Congress and signed into law in the 1860s, the '70s that could outlaw Miffer-Prist on going across border lines. I'm blanking on the name right now, but do you think that that law will have an effect? I know that some people are pushing it to try to end all the medical or chemical abortions that are going on. It is a law from the 1800s. It does say that you're according to what the clear text of the law, that you're not too meant to mail abortifacients or ship abortifacients across state lines or through the males. It does declare that. What we've got is a situation where the administration has said, "Oh, well, it either doesn't mean what it says or it's no longer applicable and we're not really getting a chance to find out whether or not the courts believe it still is enforced. It's going to have to actually go through the courts to find out who's right about that." Now, the thing is, obviously, though, if the particular team, the administration's candidate gets in the White House, you can count on the fact that they're going to continue that policy of ignoring and saying that the Comstock law is not in effect and you can count on it not being very difficult to sort of access or use it. If the other team gets in there, one that's been people that at least have some past connection to pro-life principles and things, maybe we'll get a chance to try it out and see whether the courts will say that it's still in effect or not. But that's going to largely depend on who wins the next election. And are you hopeful or what is your thoughts as far as where we are as a society? Our replacement, if you look at Caucasians in the United States, I think it's about 2.1 or no, 1.5. Do you see if we can either get rid of contraceptives or abortion that we can be, again, a prosperous thriving society in America? I know that it's a problem not just for America, but all over the world right now. For example, it's not just whether it's in Europe, even in places like Russia, they are dealing with a population drain where they are no longer having children at any sort of replacement level. Part of the reasons for that, I don't know, has it been a decline in the value of or popularity of family or marriage, that can be an issue as we begin to be too focused on just our own welfare and benefits, have different things in the culture, made us, for example, to spend more time online when we do an actual human contact. All those things are critical as far as whether or not you even have the conditions to bring about marriage and family. So I don't know, we're dealing with that, but I think one thing that has been critical has obviously been this whole sort of way that abortion has, in fact, devalued the human life and are just, I don't want to say just our respect for, but our love for, our appreciation for innocent young babies and the possibilities that each child presents and the opportunities that they could have. When people don't no longer see that, when they no longer are focused on others than themselves, if they're worried about the future, you're going to have difficulty in keeping that population up. And in America, like Europe, like even parts of Asia, we're all facing these issues. So that's a great concern. One of the fundamental things we've got to do is have a restoring appreciation for and respect for human life. And critical to that is having a pro-life society which no longer aborts and kills its next generation. Well, Rendon O'Bennon, thank you so much for being on the show today, I really appreciate your thoughts and your insights, and I know you've been looking at this issue for quite some time. And folks, we hope you found today's show to be unique and formative, content-rich, truthful and thought-provoking. Thanks for watching and listening. My name's Brendan O'Connell, your friend for life. The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at bnnmedia.org. (upbeat music)