Last Week Tonight

I watch “Last Week Tonight” religiously on Mondays. I’d watch it live at 11 PM on Sunday nights if I were not typically asleep for 90 minutes by then.

John Oliver came up with a statistic that I did not see elsewhere. That Texas judge cited a lack of oversight by the FDA when he banned mifepristone last week. Hundreds of thousands of doses of mifepristone has been given for 23 years now. We have a pretty good data set on its “danger”. Comparing it to other common drugs on the basis of fatalities per 100,000 doses:

Mifepristone 5 deaths

Penicillin 20 deaths

Viagra 49 deaths

With his vast knowledge of pharmacology, that judge set the fatality limit at 5 for drug legality. At 20 deaths per 100 K doses, penicillin must also be banned. The stuff is four times worse than The Dreaded Abortion Pill. Viagra is nearly ten times more deadly! It’s a wonder any of those septuagenarians with trophy wives (Yes, we’re looking at you Donnie) are still alive.

Will this knowledge influence the Supreme Court when they rule on mifepristone? As The Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, said about taxes, “Only the little people pay them.” The rich folk who take Supreme Court Justices on yacht trips to Bali (Yes, we’re looking at you Clarence) will still afford safe abortions. Without the abortion pill, poor women especially those in “red” states will be forced into the back alleys again.

By Ed Dufton