Last year, a teenager in Louisiana ended up in the hospital after being coerced into an abortion by her own mother. The young woman wanted to raise her baby and was even planning a sex-reveal party. But her mother went online and got a doctor in New York to mail abortion drugs to her without bothering to have so much as a Zoom call with the purported patient. The mother then reportedly pressured her daughter into taking the abortion drugs.
A woman in Texas also ended up in the hospital after this same doctor shipped abortion drugs to her. Texas sued (and won when the doctor didn’t bother to show up to court), and Louisiana has filed criminal charges, but New York is refusing to cooperate in either case. It will not enforce the Texas judgment against the doctor, nor extradite her to Louisiana, despite its constitutional obligation to do so. Meanwhile, the corporate media are downplaying the doctor’s criminal malpractice.
Pro-abortion activists have responded to the end of Roe v. Wade with a nationwide mail-order abortion drug distribution system. States such as New York are protecting those shipping abortion drugs around the nation, even as they break state and federal laws and injure women. As it turns out, women’s health and even a woman’s supposedly all-important “right to choose” matter less to abortion advocates than ensuring abortion drugs continue to flow.
A new report by my colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center shows why this mail-order abortion scheme keeps putting women and girls into the hospital: Abortion drugs are far more dangerous than has previously been admitted. The report, authored by Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan Anderson (our numbers guy and president, respectively), is the “largest-known study of the abortion pill.”
Using data from an insurance claims database that included “865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023,” they found that “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.” Their analysis ignored mild or moderate adverse effects; it also did not track deaths because they are not included in a health insurance claims database. They conclude that “the real-world rate of serious adverse effects following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of ‘less than 0.5 percent’ in clinical trials reported on the drug label.”
As the authors note, their report’s subject pool has 28 times as many women as were in “all FDA-cited clinical trials combined.” Furthermore, the data used in this new report is more recent, more representative, and the subjects are also receiving real-world health care in the United States, rather than in a clinical trial overseas.
In contrast to Anderson and Hall’s work to measure the risks of abortion drugs, Democrats have done their best to keep the dangers hidden, even while insisting abortion drugs are safe. What’s more, the safeguards and reporting requirements put in place when the abortion drug was initially approved by the Clinton administration have been all but eliminated. As the report recounts, “During the Obama and Biden administrations, the FDA chipped away at these initial safeguards, risking women’s health in order to increase access to abortion.”
Now instead of in-person visits with a doctor, who can check for contraindications (such as ectopic pregnancy) and ensure emergency care is available, the FDA requires only one telehealth visit with a prescriber, who may not even be a physician, and who may reduce the “visit” to a simple online form. Abortion drugs may then be obtained from a mail-order pharmacy and taken at home alone, with no plan or facilities for emergency care if there are complications. Worse still, the FDA removed any formal reporting requirements (which were always loosely enforced) for prescribers unless they know a patient has died — and, of course, in this mail-order abortion regime, they won’t know.
Thus, Anderson and Hall are right to insist, “Healthcare providers should be required once again to report to the FDA (and manufacturers of mifepristone) all serious adverse events resulting from the use of mifepristone.” As they have shown, abortion drugs are far more dangerous to the women taking them than the FDA and abortion advocates have admitted, so the report urges the “FDA to reinstate earlier, stronger patient safety protocols and reconsider its approval of mifepristone altogether.”
But pro-abortion activists and their Democrat political champions value abortions more than women’s health, safety, and even autonomy. After all, as seen in the Louisiana case and others, mail-order abortion drugs empower those who want to trick or pressure women into having abortions.
Anderson and Hall’s research reveals why this regime of mail-order abortion drugs keeps putting women into the hospital; these drugs are far more dangerous than has been admitted. The Trump administration should reverse the Obama and Biden policies that have allowed them to be so recklessly mailed across the country.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
