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WHO includes abortifacients in its list of essential medicines
WHO includes mifepristone and misoprostol in its 2025 list of essential medicines, generating debate on health and bioethics
The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its list of essential medicines in 2025, including two drugs used to induce abortions.
The document, titled “The Selection and Use of Essential Medicines, 2025,” includes mifepristone and misoprostol under the heading “Medicines for Medical Abortion.”
According to the WHO document, both mifepristone and misoprostol are used in cases of stillbirth and abortion. Misoprostol is also used in cases of incomplete and spontaneous abortion.
Essential medicine?
It is difficult to accept that abortion drugs are considered essential. As defined by the WHO itself, essential medicines are those that effectively and safely treat the priority health needs of the population. These medicines are selected based on their relevance to public health, and the available evidence of their benefits and harms, as well as taking into account cost, affordability, and other relevant factors.
Abortion drugs are used to terminate pregnancies by causing the death of human embryos. In addition to not being therapeutic—they don’t cure anything—they carry a high risk of side effects for women who use them, as we have previously reported.
Recent studies, conducted with more than 800,000 women who have used abortive drugs, reveal, according to data from health insurance claims related to the practice of chemical abortions with mifepristone, a high prevalence of serious adverse events such as sepsis, infection, hemorrhages and others in 10.93% of women who used it, during the 45 days following the abortion.
The grave error of attributing the WHO’s classification of these drugs, which have nothing to do with preserving the population’s health, but quite the opposite, as “essential,” can only be understood from the attempt to consider abortion a right.
There is no right to kill, nor are drugs essential if their indication is not related to the effective and safe approach to the priority health needs of the population, as established by the WHO.
Establishing health criteria based on ideological principles rather than scientific evidence oriented toward the common good constitutes a serious risk to the health of citizens, which is the primary concern of the WHO.
Julio Tudela. Ester Bosch – Bioethics Observatory – Institute of Life Sciences – Catholic University of Valencia
Observatorio de Bioética UCV
El Observatorio de Bioética se encuentra dentro del Instituto Ciencias de la vida de la Universidad Católica de Valencia “San Vicente Mártir” . En el trasfondo de sus publicaciones, se defiende la vida humana desde la fecundación a la muerte natural y la dignidad de la persona, teniendo como objetivo aunar esfuerzos para difundir la cultura de la vida como la define la Evangelium Vitae.
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