Who is really being deceptive?

When the Supreme Court acted in 2022 to send the abortion debate back to the states and overturn Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement was caught flat-footed. Since then, it has been outspent and outmessaged, and it has lost seven out of seven major abortion measures, including losses in red states like Kentucky and Kansas, with more losses likely coming this year.

Two years later, the debate is entering a new phase, and we must be better prepared. Medication abortions now make up the majority of abortion procedures, creating new flashpoints. The Supreme Court will have much to say about how and when mifepristone (the abortion pill) can be used when they decide on a critical case later this year. But pro-lifers must also be aware of a new front being opened in blue states.

Last year, Colorado became the first state to ban abortion pill reversal (APR), claiming that informing women of APR is a “deceptive trade practice.” While Colorado’s law was later blocked by a judge, its effort to ban APR will not be the last.

Already, California has sued pro-life organizations for violating a law against fraudulent business practices by advertising APR. Massachusetts, too, is going after APR providers. The Office of Health and Human Services sent a letter warning clinicians who provide APR treatment that they are “practicing inconsistently with accepted practice and subject to discipline.”

While APR medical evidence is preliminary, the studies we do have find it safe and effective.

When a woman changes her mind about medication abortion after taking mifepristone (the first abortion pill) but before taking misoprostol (the second), APR can often save the pregnancy. While mifepristone competes with progesterone, a hormone that plays a critical role in the normal functioning of the human female reproductive system, following a progesterone treatment protocol can often mitigate its impact. Since 2012, five studies have found that two-thirds (65 percent) of the women who changed their minds and received progesterone after initiating their medication abortion with mifepristone could safely continue their pregnancies versus about 25 percent who did not take progesterone.

Unfortunately, most physicians are uninformed or misinformed about APR therapy. Many have only heard the widely reported but false claims that medical evidence for APR does not exist, and that APR is unsafe. A new website, APRScience.org, attempts to challenge that narrative and inform both physicians and the public about the safety and efficacy of APR.

APR is not a guaranteed success, but for some, it makes all the difference. Krystle Arce, a Massachusetts resident, underwent APR and successfully delivered a healthy baby. While abortion advocates claim the label “pro-choice,” Arce felt that the Planned Parenthood she visited was more about promoting abortion than offering options.

“It wasn’t an environment that was open to conversation. … I didn’t feel like I could ask questions. It was very transactional,” she said.

And her anecdote is backed up by broader data about the abortion giant’s priorities. While Planned Parenthood continues to perform abortions at a high clip, its other services are offered less and less. A report of the organization’s activity in 2020-2021 found that cancer screenings are down 74 percent and prenatal services are down 72 percent since 2010, even as abortions performed hit a new high.

Planned Parenthood is not pro-choice, it’s pro-abortion.

Thankfully for Arce, she was able to find a pregnancy resource center that helped her through the APR process and made her feel valued. “She just gave me more than Pill A or Pill B,” Arce said of the center’s employee. “She talked about what assistance I could find and what support I could get, not just emotionally or physically but financially. I just felt like I had more information to make the right decision after that.”

Arce also said that even if she did go through with the abortion, she was told she would still have access to the pregnancy resource center’s support network. It was the pregnancy resource center, not Planned Parenthood, that both offered the chance to choose life and offered loving support no matter what choice was made.

Already, APR has helped over 4,000 women like Arce in more than 85 countries to choose life and keep their babies. If the pro-choice side of this debate wants to live up to its name, it would support APR. It offers another option to women going through an emotionally taxing process, women who often feel scared and alone, or even pressured to get an abortion by a partner or family member.

As blue states continue to look for more ways to provide unrestricted access to abortion up to and even after birth, we must remain vigilant about all of the avenues that they will look to pursue, including APR bans and crackdowns on the pregnancy resource centers that provide them.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said “Deception is at the heart of the operation” for pregnancy resource centers. Sen. Warren would do well to meet with constituents like Krystle Arce and see whether they feel deceived by the places that gave them the care and support they needed (and that Planned Parenthood failed to provide) when they had nowhere else to turn. Who is deceiving whom?