The Abortion Pill Is More Dangerous Than We Thought

And not just to the unborn child

Apr 28, 2025

A new EPPC study finds that the abortion pill, far from the “safe as an aspirin” claims of the pro-abortion left, actually results in adverse health events for one out of every ten women who take it.

This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.
The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.
The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.
Danco Laboratories markets Mifeprex as “the safe and effective abortion pill,” but our research shows that mifepristone abortion, as currently practiced in the U.S., is not safe and effective.1 The manufacturer and the FDA rely on the results of 10 clinical trials with a total of 30,966 participants, less than 0.5 percent of whom reportedly experienced serious adverse reactions. In contrast, we analyzed real-world insurance claims data for 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions, broadly representative of women who obtain mifepristone abortions in the U.S. today, and we find a serious adverse event rate of 10.93 percent—at least 22 times as high as the summary figure reported on the drug label.
In light of this research, we urge the FDA to reinstate earlier, stronger patient safety protocols and reconsider its approval of mifepristone altogether. Women deserve better than the abortion pill.

The full study is here.

The Group Chats That Changed America

Ben Smith at Semafor:

Occasionally over the past few years, I’ve had a friend or source tell me in wonder that Andreessen was blowing up their phone. His hunger for information was “astonishing,” one participant in the group chat said. “My impression is Marc spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time,” another correspondent marveled. “This man should be a lot busier than I am and I can barely keep up with his group chat. How does he have the time?”
Andreessen has told friends he finds the medium efficient — a way to keep in touch with three times the people in a third of the time. The fact that he and other billionaires spend so much time writing to group chats prompted participants to joke that the very pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is posting.
Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z, Andreessen joined a slew of others, including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions. The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted, and they had different settings. (“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman. “People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)
After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.” There, writers including Kmele Foster, who co-hosts the podcast The Fifth Column, Persuasion founder Yascha Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist Chris Rufo.
The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement: “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.
But the center didn’t hold. The Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech. The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.
The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative David French and the liberal academic Jason Stanley, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”
“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,” they wrote.
The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle, and considered their position a betrayal. Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.
The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development.
“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”
Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
The messages in “Everything Is Fine” are all long gone from the chats. So are many of the liberals. By then, Silicon Valley was moving right. In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic Richard Hanania to “make me a chat of smart right-wing people,” Hanania recalled. As requested, he assembled eight or ten people — elite law students and federal court clerks, as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle, a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.” Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The substance of the chats no longer exists, but Signal preserved the group’s rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing. The names, Hanania said after checking Signal, included:
Last Men, apparently
Matt Yglesias Fan Club
James Burnham Fan Club
Biden 2024 Reelect Committee
Journalism Deniers and Richard
The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,” Hanania recalled. Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.” (A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.) The group continues without him.
Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” He left the group in June of 2023.

What Canada’s Elections Really Mean

Andrew Latham in The National Interest:

Canadians head to the polls on April 28 in an election that, we’re told, is about affordability, housing, and climate. But look a little closer, and it’s clear there’s something else at stake—something deeper, darker, and dangerously neglected. Beneath the campaign slogans and economic promises lies a strategic reality that none of the main parties seem willing to confront: Canada is no longer able to defend itself, its alliances, or its sovereignty.
The leaders’ debates—both French and English—offered plenty of noise but little clarity on this point. The global order is cracking. The Arctic is militarizing. U.S. patience with free-riding allies is thinning to the breaking point. And yet, the question of defense policy barely surfaced, and when it did, it was met with deflections, platitudes, or ideological blinders. Not one leader made a credible case for how to rescue Canada’s armed forces from their current state of decay.
Let’s not pretend the stakes are modest. The Canadian Armed Forces are hollowed out, understrength, and crippled by a procurement system that’s become a national embarrassment. We don’t have enough submarines. We don’t have Arctic infrastructure. We don’t have the airlift capacity, recruitment pipeline, or political will to meet even the most basic NATO expectations. What we do have is a string of broken promises, a defense policy built on wishful thinking, and a political class more interested in optics than sovereignty.
Among the major party leaders, Pierre Poilievre has come the closest to acknowledging the scale of the crisis. He has vowed to restore Canada’s credibility in NATO and reform a procurement process that routinely turns billion-dollar investments into decade-long debacles. His tone in both debates was clipped, direct, and unapologetic: Canada can no longer afford to talk like a G7 power while acting like a client state.
To his credit, Poilievre understands that defense policy is not just about military hardware—it’s about sovereignty, deterrence, and alliance credibility. He made clear that without credible defense capabilities, Canada risks becoming strategically irrelevant. Still, his proposals remain thin in detail, and it’s far from clear whether a Poilievre government could translate urgency into delivery. But unlike his rivals, he at least recognizes the danger.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is leading the Liberals into this election after Trudeau’s departure, tried to strike a tone of competence and calm. He pointed to long-delayed procurements—the F-35s, the submarine program, Arctic patrol ships—as evidence that the Liberals are rebuilding Canada’s defenses. But Carney’s performance in both debates revealed the limits of his technocratic approach. He has inherited a defense file in shambles, and while he promises to spend more, his timeline to meet NATO obligations—2030—is less a commitment than a delay tactic.
The truth is that Carney’s party had nearly a decade to act and did not. The defense spending increases in recent months were driven not by vision or strategy but by mounting pressure from Washington and NATO headquarters. In substance, the Liberal record is one of neglect, buck-passing, and bureaucratic paralysis. In style, Carney offers polished talking points—but no urgency, no sense of crisis. That may win over voters looking for continuity. It won’t win over allies looking for capability.

Welcome the Fall of Klaus Schwab

Samuel Gregg in The Spectator:

Hubris has a way of catching up to people. That was my first thought when I read that Klaus Schwab, founder and chair of the once-mighty World Economic Forum (WEF), had resigned his position in the wake of an anonymous whistleblower alleging financial and personal misconduct on the part of Schwab and his wife (the family has strongly denied all the claims).
In early April, the 87-year-old Schwab had signaled he might step down. That process, however, rapidly accelerated on April 22 following these allegations. They come on top of a board-led independent probe into the WEF’s workplace culture – one, it was alleged, had been characterized by bullying, sexual harassment, and other forms of discrimination (in March, the WEF said the investigation “did not find the forum had committed any legal violations” and “did not substantiate” allegations against Schwab).
For an outfit as notoriously woke as the WEF, which has bent over backwards to flash its progressive credentials on every possible occasion, it’s difficult to underplay how damaging these and the new allegations have been to its reputation.
The truth, however, is that these rumblings about the WEF and Schwab in particular have occurred against a background in which the WEF’s relevance and prestige seem to have been in decline for some time. That trend has only magnified as the WEF has become identified in many people’s minds across the political spectrum as exhibiting all the worst features of the “globalist” outlook: one that ill-fits an age in which questions of national identity, national borders, and national sovereignty now occupy a center-place in world politics.

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“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.”

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