My name is Mark Rollo and I am a family physician of more than 35 years and have practiced in Fitchburg Massachusetts for the majority of that time. I am strongly opposed to HB 2399 and the twin SB 1470.

Medical abortion is not a benign process. In addition to killing the unborn, it places women at risk; a risk that is up to four times greater than a surgical abortion. Serious complications include ruptured ectopic pregnancies, hemorrhage and sepsis. So risky is the abortion pill that the FDA has placed it in a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation System which is reserved for medications that are particularly dangerous.

I want you to imagine a daughter of yours being sent off to college only to learn that the school is an adjunct to Planned Parenthood. As a father myself of daughters who have been through college I am sickened by the thought of a young women hemorrhaging while she sits on a toilet it a college dormitory or looking into the toilet to see a fully formed fetus about to be flushed. You see, the abortion pill can be given up to 9 weeks gestational age. At that age a fetus is less than an inch in length but recognizably human. What kind of a trauma is that for a young woman and her dorm mates to witness?

We don’t have enough abortion facilities in Massachusetts? We need our universities to be feeder facilities for them? We need to use millions of taxpayer dollars to provide business for Planned Parenthood and the like? Do universities want to be subject to lawsuits when outraged parents learn that their daughter died in a dorm from the abortion pill? I doubt universities want to take that PR hit even if they win such cases.

As someone who has provided the very effective abortion pill reversal treatment to women who have regretted their decision to take the abortion pill, I am also appalled that this bill has no provision to give such information to college students. Don’t they have a right to know about such treatment? Currently, thirteen states have laws on the books mandating that providers of medical abortion inform women about how to reverse medical abortion.

This bill should be flushed!