These days, it’s hard to go a few weeks without bumping into another horrifying story about a man drugging his pregnant girlfriend, wife, or daughter with the abortion drug. But as disturbing as those headlines have been, coercion doesn’t always take the form of an angry man. Sometimes, it’s a misleading abortion doctor or the impatient Planned Parenthood worker who refuses to tell the truth about mifepristone or a woman’s options. That kind of poisoning — of the mind and heart — can be just as dangerous.

“I am the generation,” Elizabeth Gillette said, “that believed the lie that chemical abortion is safe, easy, and effective. But I didn’t know that when I became pregnant in my early 20s. The coercion from Planned Parenthood started the moment I called them to make an appointment,” she recalled. “I told them that I wanted an appointment because I wanted help, and I wanted answers, and I needed to understand what my options were. And they told me, ‘When women call our office, it’s because they’ve already made up their mind. And so, by you calling us, we know that you actually do want an abortion.’”

As conflicted as she was, Elizabeth made the appointment — but doubt started creeping in the minute she arrived at the office. When her boyfriend slid the $800 fee under the window, she remembers putting her hand on the money and talking to the Planned Parenthood staffer. “‘If I change my mind, can I have a refund?’” she asked. And she was essentially told that if you don’t go through with it after talking to the doctor and having an ultrasound, “I guess we can give you a couple of dollars back.’”

Back in the room, during a transvaginal ultrasound, the screen was facing away from Elizabeth, and she asked if she could see the image. “Oh, that’s not our policy,” the doctor said. “I insisted,” Elizabeth said, “I need to see my ultrasound please,” she demanded. What she saw was a wand moving inside her body, but nothing on the screen was moving. She’d never had a child before, but she knows now that if the wand is moving, the picture should be moving. What this abortionist showed her “was a still shot or a print screen of my own ultrasound, and using that as a weapon, she said to me, ‘I’m so sorry to tell you your baby doesn’t have a heartbeat. Your baby’s not viable. You’re miscarrying anyway. You’re not doing anything wrong by taking this medication.’”

Her boyfriend, she remembers, “collapsed over my chest in thanksgiving.” But Elizabeth, terrified, only thinks about feeling abandoned. “No one was supporting me. I came to Planned Parenthood for help and support, and instead they began to coerce the chemical abortion pill. But I still couldn’t take it. Finally, the doctor, now angry, said, ‘I have patients behind you, and I need to get back to them, and I’m missing my appointments. So go and wait in my office.’”

Breaking down in tears, she asked her boyfriend to help her leave. But the doctor came back with the first pill and said, “I have to have you take this pill in front of me, and if you leave, I can’t guarantee that I can get you another appointment before the 10-week cut off [for the abortion drug]. And then you’ll have to have the surgical abortion.”

What didn’t click then, but does now, is that this doctor told Elizabeth she was miscarrying. So if the baby was dead and stopped developing, the 10-week cutoff wouldn’t matter. “She bold-faced lied to me.” And that wasn’t the only time. “They had promised me that I would feel relief,” she said emotionally. “I didn’t feel relieved, I felt sad, I felt depressed.” The next day, after the second part of the pill regimen, she was told — like every other woman at Planned Parenthood — that “it would be like a double period with some cramping — nothing that a Tylenol couldn’t cure — and I would be back to work within a day or two. That was also a lie.”

Locked in the bathroom, she experienced waves of tremors, sweats, and vomiting. “And when the bleeding started it was so profuse. There [weren’t] enough towels or anything else to mop up the blood as it pooled on the floor, around the toilet and in the tub. When I felt pressure, I felt in between my legs and pulled out a perfectly formed amniotic sac with my baby floating inside it with recognizable eyes, limbs, and ear buds.” Recoiling, she realized she had to make a choice. “I had to decide if I was going to throw my child in the trash or flush my child down the toilet. And I chose to flush him into a septic tank.”

She paused, telling the hushed room, “See, they didn’t tell me that there [were] any complications regarding this pill. They did not tell me that there was a black box warning. They did not tell me that people had sepsis or anything else. There was no follow-up care. And instead of relief, I got horrible nightmares that started where I would see people dying, and people being murdered. I would hear infants crying in the trash cans when I walked by them. I would hear infants crying in the toilet. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which I still suffer from this day. This is not safe,” Elizabeth stressed. “This is not easy. … I will never unsee my dead child in my hand. I will never take him to kindergarten. Instead, I will have nightmares. Instead, I will always regret what I did. Because I wasn’t told the truth.”

Most women aren’t. Elizabeth isn’t alone. There are hundreds of thousands of pregnant moms taking mifepristone without any clue about the danger they’re in. Charlotte Lozier Institute knows — they’ve talked to them. In a blockbuster new study, they report that most women are completely unprepared for the side effects of the abortion drug, which are serious enough to require medical attention 11% of the time.

The majority of these women — 52.5% — cited the heavy bleeding as one complication that they would have wanted more information on. “Forty-eight percent said pain was the complication they desired more information about, compared to 33.7% who mentioned mental and emotional health. Of those surveyed, 29.3% said incomplete abortion with retained tissue was the complication they wanted more information about, compared to 21.3% who cited ‘failed abortion with continued living fetus,’” The Daily Caller notes.

Another area that blindsided women was the emotional toll the process took. Seventeen percent felt regret, 14.4% anger, and 6.3% a desperation to stop or reverse the abortion. The testimonies are absolutely gut-wrenching.

“I took my first pill and I was fine. I was fine all night too. Until the next day and the day after when I absolutely broke down again regretting what I had done. … The feeling of the clots coming out of me while sitting on the toilet for an hour. The brutal pain while the main part was happening. I wish I could go back and change everything. I’m miserable and I can’t stop crying. I feel suicidal.

“It’s been 3 months since I went through with a medical abortion. Please tell me this gets easier because I’m really struggling now.

“I felt so numb, I couldn’t even cry. I spoke to the Mental Health Professional at the hospital and he offered me some numbers for counselling services which I’m waiting for in the mail currently. … All I can think about is being with my poor baby who is all alone and scared and how I should never have let them go. I still have the Pregnancy+ App downloaded on my phone and check for updates and progress, I still make baby names lists and I sleep clutching the pregnancy test which is the only physical reminder I have of my baby. I am completely broken and cannot imagine a future. … I just want my baby back.

“I feel like I made the decision in such a fog of pain. That I wasn’t thinking straight and just wanted to feel like me again, I wanted my life back and to be able to parent my two children. … I don’t know how to get past this. I keep having flashbacks and seeing the scan and the heartbeat. I want my baby back.

“I’m not scared about the pain nor what’s going to happen to me. [A]ll I can think is what a monster I am. Killing something so innocent and pure.

“Now 3 months later, and it’s the biggest regret of my life. … I just wish I could go back, how has anyone manage[d] go get over this and start moving on.”

Planned Parenthood knew the truth — and they withheld it. Even now, former employees are coming forward, acknowledging that they were a part of the lie. Mayra Rodriguez admits that she memorized those lines in her head: “It will be like Tylenol.” “You will bleed for two days.” “When you see that big blood clot, just flush it down the toilet and don’t look.” She says that it “got really easy” until she became the director of the biggest Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

“Then things changed. That’s the moment where I started seeing the babies pile up in plastic bags to be thrown [out] with trash. That’s when I started seeing the women crunching in pain in the recovery rooms.” Women started calling Mayra in desperation, asking, “‘Is this normal? There’s a pool of blood. I don’t feel well. I think I’m dying.’ And I’m instructed to tell them, ‘Put [on] a heating pad. Put your feet up. Take an ibuprofen and call me back. You will be fine.’ [But] we didn’t know that she will be fine.”

She told so many women to flush the “big blood clot in the toilet,” but they would call her back in a panic in the middle of the night, frantically explaining, “‘You told me the big blood clot, but it has hands and feet, and I think it’s even moving.’ … That changes everything,” Mayra said somberly. “I dare anyone for abortion to face women in their face and tell them it’s still okay. When you’re telling them to flush down their baby and inflicting that trauma” — all from a pill, she argues, that “started with so many restrictions in 2001.” Now, “anyone can get it any time. A 12-year-old, a 10-year-old, anyone can buy the abortion pill online, no questions asked.”

Mayra was fired for fighting back over the misinformation and falsifying patient charts. “What they cared about was protecting abortion and the wrongdoings.”

At the end of the day, these abortion businesses don’t care about transparency or accountability or women’s health. As Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) underscored, “They just want to make billions of dollars off of a drug they know is dangerous.” And it has to stop.