Radicals in the FDA are Sabotaging Trump’s Pro-Life Agenda

Next week, pro-life Americans will attend the March for Life to lobby peacefully for legal protection for the unborn. We undoubtedly have an ally in Donald Trump, who rocketed back into the White House with many friends of the unborn in important positions. And as we march for our most vulnerable young countrymen in the womb, we have a suggestion for where the president should set his reformer’s sights next: the Food and Drug Administration, where doctrinaire pro-abortion liberals are undermining his pro-life agenda.

These ideologues’ anti-life campaign doesn’t stop with babies in the womb, either: on the abortion pill, they’re doing too much, and on research for rare diseases, they’re not doing nearly enough. That’s how you get an FDA that blocks treatments and neglects research for suffering kids, while green-lighting a drug that kills hundreds of thousands of American pre-born babies every year.

Last October, the FDA, under commissioner Martin Makary and chief medical officer Vinay Prasad, approved a new, cheaper form of the abortion drug Mifepristone. Shortly before that, the same agency sent out “Complete Response Letters” to impede production of several treatments for rare diseases, like Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Sanfilippo syndrome. As The Hill reported, over 40,000 people signed a letter of opposition to the FDA’s stonewalling of these therapies, and suffering children, along with their parents, remain in medical limbo to this day.

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The situation is grim. Under Makary and Prasad, we have an FDA that supports killing children in utero, and then builds stumbling blocks for the babies who manage to make it through birth.

I’ve been in the pro-life movement a long time, including during Trump’s first term, where we saw many successes. Trump has always wisely and correctly focused on pro-life priorities, like appointing pro-life Supreme Court justices and enforcing the pro-life Hyde Amendment, which protects taxpayers from funding abortion. But this time around, we have millions more abortion pills flooding the market thanks to Makary’s FDA — and not only that, but whispers in D.C. suggest Republicans might become more “flexible” regarding the Hyde Amendment at a time when Americans need it the most.

One obvious solution to this two-horned problem — pushing drugs to kill children, and neglecting treatments that could save them — is some good, old-fashioned turnover.  The president doesn’t those from within undermining his agenda — a lesson he learned well from his first term.

The opposite of a solution, both for the pro-life movement and for Trump’s legacy, is compromise. Making nice with pro-abortion forces never turns out well, especially for a president who’s billed himself, with some justification, as “the most pro-life president in American history.” The best he’ll get is temporary overtures from leftists who will stab him in the back the moment it suits their interests. Worse, he’ll go down in history among his most loyal supporters — pro-lifers, Evangelicals, values conservatives — as an accommodationist, a flip-flopper, or even a liar.

Trump has never been any of these things, and now’s not the time to change that and betray his base. Especially with a pro-life president this vigorous, we can have an FDA that works to protect all human life, even those lives yet to be born. We can have an FDA that prioritizes and funds research for drugs and treatments for rare diseases — not for kickbacks or good publicity, but because it’s the right thing to do. We can even have both at the same time…but maybe not while Martin Makary is running things in Silver Spring.

If I could get the president’s ear, I would gently suggest a change in leadership at the FDA. I’d also suggest drawing Americans’ attention to the children who suffer from Sanfilippo, from Barth syndrome, from a host of other rare diseases most people have never heard of, but that cause real pain for real kids. We’re a compassionate people, and our empathy can become a national outcry against those who callously bar these children from a better life.  And then, later this month, the crowds who come from all over the country to march for the unborn can hope, reasonably, that a newly staffed FDA that prioritizes vulnerable born children will stand up for the unborn ones as well.

Life News Note: Ericka Andersen led digital strategy for the House Republican Conference and The Heritage Foundation. A longtime pro-life columnist, she is the author of the book, “Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith,” which was published last week.

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