Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who’s been convinced of his own brilliance at least since he was a teenager, decided Wednesday to show just how willfully ignorant he is. Tweeting about the medical abortion drug Mifeprex, Cruz wrote, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease. Make no mistake, Mifeprex is a dangerous pill. That’s why 20 of my Republican colleagues and I are urging @US_FDA to classify it as such.”
Reaction on Twitter was swift and brutal and centered around a few key points: Pregnancy, while not an illness, is absolutely a life-threatening condition. Many women die in pregnancy or childbirth—and Cruz’s own state of Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, at 35.8 per 100,000 live births. High rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. hit Black women especially hard—the numbers are 17.4 per 100,000 live births overall and 37.1 per 100,000 for Black women. Abortion is safer than pregnancy and childbirth, and, as many noted, erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra are more dangerous than medical abortion drugs like Mifeprex.