Op-Ed: Women deserve protection from the harm of mail-order abortion pills

By David Bereit | Life Leadership Conference
The Center Square

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally begun reviewing the data on the abortion pill mifepristone’s harms to women. The organization’s interim report could be released as early as this month.

Yet Americans have been awaiting this review since September of last year. In the meantime, women and girls nationwide are suffering a wave of mifepristone-related coercion and abuse.

Their stories are a shocking indictment of both mail-order abortion and mifepristone itself.

Unfortunately, ongoing litigation in court cases involving mail-order mifepristone, likeLouisiana v. FDA, is not moving quickly enough to guarantee timely or strong protections. Until the government takes action to protect citizens and settle the lawsuits, American women deserve to know the risks associated with the abortion pill.

Women should know about Jona Affholder, a young healthcare nurse in Ohio whose boyfriend forced mifepristone pills down her throat after she refused to have an abortion. He prevented Jona from seeking medical help or even leaving the house. Jona’s unborn baby died as a result. Today, Jona lives with the trauma and physical consequences.

Women also deserve to know about Catherine Herring, a Houston woman whose husband spiked her drinks with chemical abortion pills numerous times. Catherine‘s husband allegedly purchased the pills from Mexico – showing how dangerous the unregulated mail-order drug landscape has become.

Rosalie Markezich, a young woman from Louisiana and the plaintiff in Louisiana v. FDA, suffered a similar fate. When Rosalie refused to have an abortion, her boyfriend used her information to purchase mifepristone online from California. Once the pills arrived, Rosalie’s boyfriend coerced her into swallowing them. Rosalie mourned the loss of her child – bleeding and in pain on the bathroom floor.

In Rosalie’s case and others, mail-order abortion incentivized abusers to commit fraud, poison women, and break state pro-life laws in the process.

Jona, Rosalie, and Catherine’s experiences are not unique. Peer-reviewed data shows that 7 out of 10 women with a history of abortion say that their abortions were “inconsistent with their own values and preferences.” One out of four post-abortive women say their abortions were unwanted or coerced. The prevalence of abortion coercion should sound the alarm regarding mail-order abortion drugs, which enable abusers to purchase mifepristone and poison women and girls with impunity.

Mail order abortion pills also circumvent pro-life laws at women’s expense. Jona, Rosalie, Catherine and the many other victims of mifepristone share a common theme: they are proof that without an in-person dispensing requirement for abortion drugs, state pro-life laws are powerless to protect local women and girls from abortion-related coercion.

Despite compounding evidence, however, some American leaders are loathe to act. They defend their hesitancy by saying that mifepristone is “safe as Tylenol” or that the science on it is “settled.”

This is patently untrue. Not only are there no scientifically-appropriate studies comparing abortion drugs to Tylenol, but a recent study found that mifepristone’s “serious adverse event” (SAE) rate is 22 times higher than what the FDA reports.

One in ten women who take mifepristone suffer a serious or life-threatening event within 45 days. And mifepristone taken in the second trimester has an almost 40% failure rate.

These risks are in addition to those women face when they – or their abusers – purchase abortion pills in the mail. Without an in-person doctors visit, women don’t know if they are taking mifepristone with life-threatening complications like ectopic pregnancies. They also may not know if they are past the FDA’s recommended 10-week gestational limit. This is especially dangerous because over 80% of abortion providers send women the pills past the recommended 10-week timeframe.

Just recently, my colleague and board-certified OB/GYN Dr. Christina Francis tried purchasing abortion pills online to see if abortion providers had proper safeguards on the process. She was horrified to discover that she could purchase mifepristone despite telling the provider that she was a minor with a history of ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. The site didn’t even require identification.

How is this legal?

Mail-order abortion was illegal until the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare providers used to admit the dangers of distributing potentially life-threatening pills without appropriate screenings, like ensuring that the recipient was not a victim of abortion coercion or sex trafficking. The Biden Administration dismissed this longstanding practice to advance a deeply unpopular pro-abortion agenda.

The FDA’s long-awaited review offers hope that American leaders might finally reinstate longstanding protections on dangerous chemical abortion pills – something that 70% of Americans support. It should also incentivize the Department of Justice to settle litigation in Louisiana v. FDA.

For women like Jona, Rosalie and Catherine, this is not just a policy debate. It’s a discouraging reminder that too many American leaders continue allowing blatant medical malpractice to end lives and scar women – either because they are either too apathetic or afraid to confront the crisis.

It’s time for that to change, before any more women experience coercion or harm.