We are again witnessing the dangers of COVID-era policies that swept away any requirement for a woman to meet in-person with a medical professional before being prescribed abortion pills. Such policies make it much easier for men to force women into abortions, or even to lace their food with abortion pills. 

Last week, an Irish man, Adeleke Adelani, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for telling the woman he was seeing, who loved their unborn baby, that he would beat her until their baby died unless she took abortion pills he had obtained in Dublin. 

Adelani had invited the woman into his home for a Valentine’s Day date under the pretense that he wanted to raise their baby together. He recorded the premeditated encounter on his phone, and his words are truly chilling. 

“It’s either you eat this, or I beat that kid out of you tonight,” he said. “I’m dead serious. ... I’m forcing you. I don’t care. Take it.”

According to the judge, the woman’s tears are “audible” in the recording. 

Adelani gave the mother five misoprostol tablets and then locked her in a room until she swallowed them. After she swallowed the abortion pills, she was in great pain and passed clots of blood as well as the baby. She called the police, who arrested Adelani on the scene.

At the time of the baby’s murder, which occurred in 2020, the baby’s parents were young — the mother was 20, and the father was 22. The baby was around nine weeks’ gestation, meaning that he or she had formed his or her eyes and his or her fingers and toes. 

In court last week, the baby’s mother testified to her love for her baby and how devastated she was to lose him or her: “My baby was real to me. I had hopes, dreams, and a bond with the life that was growing inside me, and all of it was violently stolen from me in a moment of cruelty that I will never forget.”

“When he wrongfully imprisoned me and caused the termination of my nine-week pregnancy, he took far more than my freedom,” she said. “He took my child. He took my sense of safety. He took a future that I had already begun to plan and love.”

The baby’s mother heroically followed Christ’s call to forgiveness. During her victim impact statement, she said: “I have forgiven the defendant. The forgiveness does not mean what he did was acceptable. It means I refuse to let what he did continue to control my heart and my life.”

The man pleaded guilty to unlawfully ending the life of a fetus and assault against the woman. The final two years of his 11-year sentence are suspended because he apologized for the killing. 

This case in Ireland is far from isolated. There are numerous cases in the United States of men accused of intervening with deadly action to end the lives of their unwanted babies. This trend has accelerated following the Biden administration’s April 2021 decision to allow the dispensing of abortion pills without an in-person visit. Doctors previously used such in-person visits to verify that a woman wanted an abortion of her own free will. 

An Ohio doctor, Hassan-James Abbas, was accused last year of holding his girlfriend down by the throat in the middle of the night and forcing crushed abortion pills into her mouth in order to kill their baby. His medical license was suspended in November, and he faces charges of abduction and unlawful distribution of an abortion-inducing drug. 

In June of last year, a Texas man, Justin Anthony Banta, was charged with murder for allegedly putting abortion pills into his girlfriend’s drink and cookies when they met at a coffee shop. The couple’s baby died after the mother experienced heavy bleeding and went to the emergency room. The woman had the drink but not the cookies; FBI testing found that the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol were present in the cookies. Surveillance video in the coffee shop showed him pouring a white substance into her drink.

In August 2025, Illinois man Emerson Evans was charged with two counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child after police discovered a horrible scene of a dead baby in a toilet, a large amount of blood, and a woman crying. Evans allegedly told police that he was helping “make the decision for her.” Evans is accused of giving the mother of his baby abortion pills without her knowledge. The baby was around seven weeks’ gestation. 

In January 2023, the Biden administration’s FDA made permanent its emergency rule ending the requirement for an in-person visit for the dispensing of abortion pills. The Trump administration has chosen to keep that rule in place, meaning that it is incredibly easy for men to obtain abortion pills via telemedicine, even in states where abortions are illegal or heavily restricted. And blue states are increasingly passing laws that allow doctors to avoid putting their names on telemedicine abortion pill prescriptions, allowing them to avoid responsibility for what is done with the pills. 

In the case of Abbas, the Ohio doctor indicted for forcing his girlfriend to ingest abortion pills, he was able to easily obtain the drugs by filling out his ex-wife’s name on an online form. There was no check of his identity, or whether the woman he was impersonating really wanted to abort her baby. He was later charged with identity fraud and deception to obtain a dangerous drug. 

Unfortunately, the full scale of this phenomenon is unknown because men can lace their wives or girlfriends’ food with abortion pills, and women will likely think they just suffered a miscarriage. There are practically no guardrails on telemedicine abortions in the U.S. to ensure abortion pills will be used voluntarily.

The Trump administration has faced pressure from pro-life advocates to restore the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion pills, or to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone entirely. Pro-lifers have mostly focused on the argument that abortion pills are dangerous to women.

Last year, the Ethics and Public Policy Center published a study of 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions that found that 10.93% of women who took the drugs experienced “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event.” This is 22 times higher than what is claimed on the drug’s label. 

Another danger with abortion pills relates to ectopic pregnancies. In cases of ectopic pregnancy, which occurs in 1-2% of pregnancies, it is extremely dangerous for a woman to take an abortion pill because it could lead her to believe that her symptoms are due to her baby’s death, when in reality an abortion pill will not end an ectopic pregnancy. An untreated ectopic pregnancy can cause a severe medical emergency and even result in a woman’s death. For this reason, the original guidelines for the dispensing of abortion pills in the United States required a medical provider to verify that the pregnancy was not ectopic. In practice, this meant that an ultrasound was performed prior to the dispensing of abortion pills. 

In the case in Ireland, Adeleke Adelani obtained the abortion pills he used a few months before Ireland implemented an emergency pandemic provision to pause the requirement for women to make two in-person visits in order to receive abortion pills. Ireland has kept that same policy in place post-pandemic. 

Eilís Mulroy, spokesperson for the Irish organization Pro Life Campaign, said following Adelani’s sentencing that this is only one of several cases of forced abortions in Irish courts in recent years. 

Mulroy said that the phenomenon is related to the removal of the in-person dispensing requirement, which makes it difficult to identify if a woman is being coerced. 

“The shift to telemedicine ‘at-home’ abortions during Covid-19 — a measure later made permanent by the Government — removed the safeguard of an in-person consultation with a doctor before abortion pills are dispensed,” she said. “This makes it harder to identify cases where a woman may be under pressure or coercion.”

Mulroy continued, “The ease with which controlling partners can obtain abortion pills should raise serious red flags. Telemedicine abortion needs to be closely looked at and reassessed by any taskforce addressing coercive abortion. There should be no delays. The investigation must happen now.”

Likewise, the Trump administration needs to be held to account for how its continuation of the Biden administration’s abortion pill policy has enabled men to easily kill their unborn babies without mothers even knowing.

Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of “Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power” and a reporter at the American Spectator.