The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster

It’s alive!

No, not the unborn baby who just died from a drug-induced abortion, as happens every thirty seconds in the United States, per Guttmacher Institute data. But the legal monster created by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s deregulation of the abortion pill, mifepristone, lives and is wreaking havoc across the country.

Pro-life activists should have seen it coming. For nearly a half-century, we focused on reversing the outrageous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that fashioned a federal right to abortion from thin air and the “progressive” court’s imagination. Yet when we finally succeeded in abolishing Roe in 2022, the abortion lobby was already miles ahead — and winning battles we were totally unprepared for.

Six months before the Dobbs decision, abortion activists secured a monumental victory: chemical abortion on demand in every state.

While that may not have been the FDA’s intention in lifting the in-person dispensation requirement on mifepristone, it has been the consequence. Even in states where abortion is all but banned, women are now able to order abortion drugs online and receive them in their mailbox, no doctor’s visit necessary.

Besides the health and safety risks this presents, it’s also triggered an abortion crime wave and interstate drama the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the Civil War era.

As the nation grapples with the fallout, the legal complications underscore an important truth: Abortion is not now, nor was it ever, a states’ rights issue.

Reproductive Roulette

When the FDA first approved Mifeprex, or brand-name mifepristone, in 2000, it required prescribers to abide by several restrictions. The pills had to be dispensed by, or under the supervision of, a licensed physician, and only for terminating pregnancies up to seven weeks’ gestation.

The two-drug regimen also required three doctor visits in total. The first two visits were to dispense the mifepristone, which kills the baby by depriving it of the pregnancy hormone progesterone, and the contraction-initiating misoprostol, which expels the child’s remains from the uterus. Patients were then told to follow up with their doctors on the fourteenth day.

In 2016, the Obama FDA approved sweeping changes to the chemical abortion regimen: extending the pills’ approved use for up to ten weeks’ gestation, allowing nonphysicians to dispense them, and reducing mandatory office visits to one.

The FDA also modified its reporting requirements for mifepristone, removing any obligation for prescribers to report nonfatal complications. Evidently, unless a woman dies from the drug, the FDA is uninterested in any harmful side effects.

The agency’s indifference became even more apparent in December 2021, amid the COVID pandemic, when the Biden FDA nixed the last required doctor’s visit to allow women to obtain mifepristone online.

The dangers of that move cannot be overstated. The risk of complications from using mifepristone rises as a pregnancy progresses, and accurately dating a pregnancy requires an in-office ultrasound. 

Additionally, only an ultrasound can rule out a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy — a crucial step as mifepristone only works on intrauterine pregnancies. The drug’s side effects may also mask the symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy, leaving a woman believing she’s aborted her baby and unaware her life is in danger.

Recent studies of medical insurance claims data conducted by my colleagues at the Restoration of America Foundation as well as the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that chemical abortion has a serious adverse event rate of 10.93 percent.

In other words, more than one in ten women will experience serious complications from a chemical abortion, including hemorrhage, sepsis, uterine rupture, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, infection, and even death. That is twenty-two times the risk the FDA currently acknowledges and one dangerous game of reproductive roulette.

An Abortion Crime Wave

While the data suggests the safety risks of mifepristone are significant, the FDA’s reckless deregulation of the drug threatens more than women’s health.

The growing online market for abortion drugs has generated a wave of illegal and coercive abortions that is killing the unborn nationwide at an alarming rate. Those seeking an off-ramp from parenthood have their pick of online providers who will ship abortion pills to any state — even those with near-total abortion bans. One such provider is Aid Access, which only requires that users fill out an online form to receive its pills.

A quick test run of that form proves age isn’t a factor. Aid Access will ship the pills to minors under 16 years old without parental notification or consent, even though most states require at least the former for minors seeking abortions.

Additionally, while the form requires users to sign an agreement confirming the pills are for their personal use, no effort is made to verify that the recipient is even female, much less pregnant.

That oversight alone has allegedly resulted in at least one forced abortion and sparked a legal dispute in Texas, which has banned virtually all abortions.

A lawsuit filed August 11 in the Southern District of Texas accuses Aid Access of unlawfully providing Marine pilot Christopher Cooprider with abortion pills earlier this year. Cooprider has been accused of using the drugs to spike the drink of plaintiff Liana Davis, hospitalizing her, and killing their unborn child.

Another ongoing Texas case involving coerced drug-induced abortion could result in the first capital murder conviction for such a crime. According to the Parker County Sheriff’s Office, defendant Justin Anthony Banta allegedly spiked his girlfriend’s drink with abortion drugs he bought online and then attempted to wipe the evidence from his phone.

Similar cases have cropped up in Florida, Illinois, and Louisiana, all following the FDA’s deregulation spree. The Louisiana case in particular underscores yet another legal challenge prompted by the agency’s actions: interstate abortion crime.

Complications of Shield Laws

Since Roe’s fall, many conservative political leaders have proclaimed abortion to be a states’ rights issue. The reality, however, could not be further from the truth, as demonstrated by the New York abortionist Dr. Maggie Carpenter.

Carpenter, a physician and cofounder of the nonprofit Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, is wanted in Louisiana for allegedly mailing abortion pills to the mother of a pregnant teen for an illegal, coerced abortion. Louisiana has outlawed abortion under most circumstances save those involving a fatal fetal abnormality or when deemed necessary to protect the mother’s life.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a warrant demanding Carpenter’s extradition to his state on February 11, but New York Governor Kathy Hochul has refused to comply.

“Louisiana has changed their laws, but that has no bearing on the laws here in the State of New York,” Hochul said at a February 13 press conference. “Doctors take an oath to protect their patients. I took an oath of office to protect all New Yorkers, and I will uphold not only our constitution, but also the laws of our land.”

Hochul cited her state’s shield laws, which exist to help telemedicine abortionists evade justice for facilitating illegal abortions elsewhere that would be legal in New York. What she failed to mention: Coerced abortions are unlawful in New York and therefore not protected by the state’s shield laws.

Regardless, thanks to New York’s willingness to aid and abet interstate abortion crime, Carpenter has yet to answer for her alleged offense. She has also avoided paying more than $100,000 in court-ordered fines for providing a Texas woman with drugs for yet another illegal abortion.

Meanwhile, a Texas man has filed a lawsuit against a California doctor for allegedly providing the abortion drugs that killed his unborn child. The case presents a test for California’s own abortion shield laws.

Alongside the pileup of these cases, questions are growing over how states can enforce their abortion laws against people whom other states have sworn to protect.

In a July 29 letter to congressional leaders, sixteen state attorneys general argued that shield laws violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution “because they do not give ‘full faith and credit’ to the judicial proceedings occurring in other States.” They added that such laws could also clash with the Extradition Clause — which requires compliance with governors’ extradition warrants — and asked Congress to weigh in.

A House Divided

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has pledged to review mifepristone’s safety. If he decides to restore the FDA’s prior in-person restrictions or pull the drug off-market — as he should — some of these legal disputes could be resolved. An ongoing federal lawsuit spearheaded by the state of Missouri could also secure the drug’s withdrawal, if successful.

Even so, the larger threat to our already fragile Union will remain. As the states attempt to resolve their differences in court, they will eventually realize that the cavernous national divide on abortion cannot be bridged with litigation.

That’s a lesson our forefathers once learned the hard way when grappling with another monstrous injustice, slavery.

Much like slave states once did, pro-abortion states dehumanize an entire portion of the human race by depriving the unborn of the most fundamental right: life. But as the nation eventually realized with slavery, there can be no compromise on basic God-given rights.

We are either all created equal with the unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or we are not. There is no single point during pregnancy when a human being suddenly becomes a person worthy of those rights. There is no magic in the birth canal that transforms a “fetus” into a “baby” deserving of legal protection.

The only qualification for human rights should be humanity. Here’s hoping that this time around, it doesn’t take another bloody war for the United States to acknowledge that.

Samantha Flom is a senior investigative researcher for Restoration News who specializes in life issues.

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