The abortion pill pushers

So much for the doctor.

Pro-abortion advocates spent decades insisting that abortion should be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. This was always misleading—an abortionist is rarely a woman’s doctor, but often is someone she has never seen before and hopes never to see again—but now doctors are being sidelined entirely in favor of DIY abortions.

Abortions used to happen at abortion clinics. But the Biden administration changed the rules by eliminating the requirement for an in-person doctor visit before getting abortion drugs. This meant that anyone could fill out an online form and have those drugs mailed to their door in days—no exam required. These drugs are now the most common abortion method in the United States, and the Trump administration has maintained this Biden policy of mail-order abortion pills, even defended it in ongoing court cases. The result is a few prescribers running online abortion pill mills that even reach into states where abortion is illegal. After Dobbs, pro-lifers expected abortions to drop—but the FDA’s deregulation of abortion drugs have caused abortions to increase.

Pro-abortion activists are already laying the groundwork to go a step further and make abortion drugs as easy to buy as children’s gummy vitamins—no prescription required. The PR campaign has already begun. A recent NPR headline assured readers that “researchers say” that over-the-counter abortion drugs would be “safe.” The article began with a fantasy about easily buying abortion pills in a “medication abortion kit,” and then quoted the pro-abortion author of the research paper. Only in the 5th paragraph did NPR get around to explaining what the researchers actually did. It turns out that the study consisted of asking women procuring abortion drugs in-person to read a proposed label for these abortion drugs and then decide if it would be safe to use them. Forget asking your doctor, just read the label and ask yourself if abortion drugs are right for you.

Naturally, the researchers rigged the study. They screened out anyone who couldn’t “read and speak English” or who was under 15, which is to say that they deliberately excluded the women and girls least likely to understand and evaluate the label. The researchers reported approaching 260 women, of whom 172 agreed to participate, with 168 completing the study. Of those who participated, a large majority thought they were eligible to take the abortion drugs. But, after clinical examination, about 10% of these women turned out not to be cleared to take the abortion drugs.

Far from showing that over-the-counter abortion drugs would be safe, this study showed that making abortion drugs over-the-counter would be dangerous for women. And even if every woman seeking abortion drugs was able to read and understand the label, some contraindications, such as ectopic pregnancy, are impossible to screen for without an in-person visit to a doctor.

Furthermore, abortion drugs are dangerous even to women who supposedly meet the criteria for using them. Real world data show that about 1 in 10 women who take abortion drugs experience at least one serious adverse effect—and that’s with a doctor visit. This intrinsic risk has been made worse by the current regime of mail-order abortion drugs, with no doctor or in-person visit required. And yet abortion advocates want abortion drugs made available over-the-counter, without even the pretense of a telehealth consultation with a doctor.

This will only worsen the abuse and exploitation already enabled by the current lax mail-order abortion drug regime. Predators and abusers can get their hands on these drugs as easily as women can, and they have. In case after case women and girls have been coerced or tricked into taking abortion drugs. States such as New York and California are even making a point of refusing to extradite the doctors who are illegally shipping these abortion drugs to other states to be used in these forced abortions. The NPR reporter imagined a world in which every woman can easily get DIY abortion drugs. But that is also a world in which every abusive boyfriend, every trafficker, and every pimp can also easily get abortion drugs and force their victims to take them.

Abortion supporters are fine with that. Not only do they have no regard for human life in utero, they care more about abortion access than they do about women’s safety or freedom. This is why pro-abortion activists are abandoning all of their supposed principles in order to enable as many abortions as possible. This is why philosophers are arguing for mandatory abortions. And this is why researchers and reporters are lobbying to make abortion drugs as easily available as cough drops. Forget a woman and her doctor—now it’s just a woman and a warning label.