Real-Life Horror Stories Ignored by Dems in Chemical Abortion Push

“[The blood] — it looked like I was sitting in the middle of a crime scene. I suppose it was a crime scene. I mean, I had just murdered my child … But this couldn’t be normal. Planned Parenthood didn’t ever tell me this could happen ... I decided that I would call them in the morning … if I didn’t die before then.” —Abby, 23

Abby lived. In fact, she went on to become one of the most effective pro-life activists in the movement: Abby Johnson. Like a lot of women, she thought taking the abortion pill would be the easy way out. She was wrong. Her nightmare — of gushing blood and excruciating pain, of clumps passing out of her body while she cried and vomited and sweated alone — is the story of tens of thousands of women. She vowed, right then and there, that when she went back to work at Planned Parenthood afterward, she would do everything in her power to stop a patient from choosing a medication abortion. “I didn’t want anyone to experience what I had...”

But Planned Parenthood didn’t care about the horrors. They cared about the dollars. And chemical abortions were a good way to make a fast buck. So as they pushed this option at their clinics, Abby pushed back. She told her clients about the risks. She told them about the terrifying 12 hours she spent, lying on the bathroom floor. She explained the eight weeks of blood clots. Eight weeks of nausea. Eight weeks of excruciating cramps. Eight weeks of heavy bleeding. “I had seen too many women … hurt by this ‘natural’ abortion method. There was nothing natural about it.” Then, one day at a management meeting, she spoke up. Why weren’t they telling women what really happened? “Well, we don’t want to scare them,” her supervisor said. “Oh, like they’re scared when they think they are dying from the amount of blood they are losing because we choose not to tell them that is supposedly normal,” she fired back.

As dangerous as chemical abortions were then, they’re even more lethal now. Long before Roe v. Wade was struck down, the online pill market was exploding, as scores of American women decided to bypass surgical abortions — instead ordering unverified drugs from the internet without a single assurance that they’re safe. India’s back-alley pharmacy has been booming, flooding mailboxes in the U.S. with packs of pills to end pregnancies that could easily be fake or contaminated. 

Now, as states race to limit or ban abortion, the percentage of chemical abortions — already sky-high at 54% of the U.S. total — is set to swell. And that’s exactly what experts like Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch are worried about. Before the Supreme Court struck down Roe, conservative states were already experiencing a chemical abortion boom. According to the Washington Post, “orders from Texas increased by 1,000 percent when the state enacted its six-week ban in the fall” — despite the state’s prohibition on abortion pills. The problem, reporters point out, is not that states don’t have laws against chemical abortions (almost half do). The issue is that “overseas pharmacies aren’t beholden to U.S. law,” so it’s extremely difficult for anyone to police these shipments.

That spells disaster for women, who wrongly believe this is the easy way out of their pregnancies. “[A chemical abortion] is simply two pills, and at this point, it doesn’t even require an in-person visit,” Szoch pointed out. And “while every abortion is dangerous for an unborn child,” the director of FRC’s Center for Human Dignity warned, “chemical abortion is incredibly dangerous for women.” In one of the only states to track the health complications from chemical abortion — Arkansas — the 2020 data shows that 88.9% of abortion complications are the result of chemical abortions. (Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Ohio are the only other states reporting.) “With the rise in chemical abortion, there will be a rise in the number of women dying as the result of abortion.”

President Biden and his army of abortion fanatics obviously don’t care about the risks, which, as Szoch points out in her research, are substantial. “Between 2000 and 2021, a total of 4,207 adverse events related to chemical abortions were reported to the FDA. These events include 26 maternal deaths, 97 ectopic pregnancies, and 1,045 hospitalizations. It is important to note that these numbers only represent the adverse events voluntarily reported to the FDA, so we do not have a full picture of the data.”

Late last year, the administration did its best to add to those numbers, doing away with the in-person requirement for abortion pill prescriptions. Now, as the “do-it-yourself” abortion culture grows, so do the victims. And yet the president and his team are continuing to fight — not just to relax the supervision and safety standards, but to do away with the prescription requirement altogether, putting Americans on the path to lethal, over-the-counter abortion drugs. 

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is throwing down the gauntlet, telling the country after the Supreme Court’s ruling, “States may not ban [the abortion drug] Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” The White House piled on, directing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra to “identify all ways to ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” Regardless, it seems, of the consequences.

Chemical abortion is brutal, bloody, traumatic process that no one — even under the best of circumstances — is prepared for. The effects can last for weeks — the complications, for a lifetime. The last thing the world needs is politicians making an already treacherous option more available. “Looking back,” Abby says, “I wasn’t given a ‘choice,’” because no one told her the truth. It’s time to tell that truth now — and use every avenue to stop the ones who won’t.

For more on this dangerous new chapter in the abortion debate, check out Mary Szoch’s “The Next Abortion Battleground: Chemical Abortion.”