DIY Abortion Returns: From Back Alleys to Bathrooms
For decades, the most potent image deployed in favor of legalized abortion has been the coat hanger. The message has always been blunt: If abortion is not provided by licensed physicians using sanitized instruments, women will resort to desperate and dangerous methods on their own. The image is deliberately visceral—an unwound wire hanger, a woman attempting to induce an abortion herself, risking hemorrhage or death. For many, this visual horror has been emotionally persuasive, serving as a justification for legal, surgical abortion as a lesser evil.
This never worked at persuading me; sanitized instruments and a medical license can’t rid the procedure of its disgusting end result: dead baby parts. Where the self-administered hanger always stunned me for how it resembled a violent murder-suicide standoff—if you don’t give me what I want, I’ll kill us both!—to me, the abortion lobby’s attempts to brand abortion as a legitimate medical procedure just made it sound more like a systematized effort to obscure the scale and nature of what is being done.
Still, by and large, the coat-hanger image worked, both on individual and societal levels. Men involved in abortion decisions have reported supporting abortion out of fear that their partners might pursue unsafe alternatives, and organizations such as Planned Parenthood have long relied on this emphasis on “safety” to attract supporters.1 It is far more palatable to claim that one is preventing women from bleeding to death than to acknowledge participation in the routine killing of unborn children.
“We provided X number of safe abortions,” advocacy groups will declare,2 as though the only alternative was less-safe abortions, not a well-supported woman and a living, breathing child, which true charity could actually provide.
When “Safe and Legal” Stops Meaning Medical
That longstanding narrative—that abortion is a medical decision, and as such is safest when performed under a doctor’s supervision—has become increasingly strained in the era of the abortion pill. Actually it’s two pills: mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the growing human. According to Planned Parenthood’s website, the second pill “causes cramping and bleeding to empty your uterus. It’s kind of like having a really heavy, crampy period, and the process is very similar to an early miscarriage.”3
This form of “medication abortion” has become the dominant method of abortion in the United States. The Guttmacher Institute reports that, in 2023, medication abortion accounted for 63 percent of clinician-provided abortions.4 Guttmacher notes that the drug can be provided by clinicians “other than physicians,” which they consider to be a positive development that expands access and availability. Never mind that such pills, often ordered online, require no in-person medical oversight or follow-up care. Women are encouraged to manage the process alone at home, even as evidence mounts that this approach carries substantial medical risks.
How Did We Get Here?
One might say abortion providers took the social distancing measures of the Covid pandemic and ran with them to expand ease of access to abortion pills. In 2020, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, with support from the ACLU, sued the FDA, saying its rules for abortion drugs put doctors and patients at risk.5 The FDA later rolled back those rules. In 2021, the agency stopped enforcing its longstanding safety requirements for mifepristone so that patients no longer had to go to a clinic in person; they could meet with a provider online and have abortion pills mailed to them.6 This change led to some states enacting “shield laws”—measures that protect providers who prescribe or mail abortion drugs across state lines, even when those drugs are restricted elsewhere.7
And that’s how abortion—the procedure previous activists touted as an essential “healthcare decision between a woman and her doctor”—became anything but. Since these are powerful drugs being taken without medical supervision, it should not surprise anyone that things can go wrong. For example, without an ultrasound, if mail-order abortion pills are sent to a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy, her life-threatening condition will be left untreated and could lead to a ruptured fallopian tube.8
The End of Doctor-Directed Abortion
In April 2024, The Washington Post published a feature story titled “Alone In a Bathroom: The Fear and Uncertainty of a Post-Roe Medication Abortion,” sharing the story of Angel, who experienced pain “sharp enough that the 23-year-old said she struggled to stand.” The Washington Post reports, “While Angel would be fine by the next morning, she worried that something might be very wrong as she lay on the cold bathroom tile, her body racked by some of the worst pain she could remember. When Angel’s fiancé came in to check on her, she was having diarrhea while vomiting into their popcorn bowl. ‘F, she remembered yelling, over and over. ‘I feel like I need to push.’”9
If you look for them, stories like Angel’s can be found interspersed in roundups of women’s experiences after taking the abortion pill. A woman named Cynthia told TODAY in 2023, “I wasn’t provided as much support as I would have liked, nor was I properly informed of the impact the abortion would have on my body.”10 A woman named Claire told Vogue in 2022, “It was honestly surreal. I kept cramping and got sicker, and I ended up throwing up a lot . . . . The abortion pill can be very painful, and I feel I wasn’t properly warned about how sick I could get.”11 Another told Vice in 2020 that it was like giving birth: “I have a pretty high pain tolerance so I was just counting the seconds through [the contractions] until they would go away . . . I probably used the restroom about seven times in two hours [I] actually saw the embryo come out of me in the toilet. It scared me and I flushed it really quickly.”12 Reviewing women’s different experiences, I’d often encounter stories where women called it the worst experience of their life.
The 2024 Washington Post piece summarized, “as more women in states with abortion bans choose to end their pregnancies on their own, without directly interacting with a medical professional, they are thrust into a largely ad hoc, unregulated system of online and grassroots abortion pill distributors—an experience that, while deemed generally safe by medical experts, can be confusing, scary and, at times, deeply traumatic.”
It’s not often The Washington Post is caught echoing Abby Johnson, the Planned Parenthood employee turned prolife activist, but compare the Post summary to what Johnson wrote in Newsweek in 2023:
These women aren’t told what they will experience or how much pain they may be in. They aren’t told they may feel like they are dying because of the pain and the loss of blood. They aren’t told that, if they are further along in pregnancy than they thought, they may see the “product of conception”—looking very much like a tiny baby—come out of their body.
Of her medication abortion many years prior, Johnson says, “It was a horrific experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. The number of medication abortions is only going up and the mental health community does not seem equipped to deal with it—or even acknowledge there may be a problem. Most therapists and clinicians don’t ask about reproductive loss or have any idea how past abortions can severely affect the mental health of both women and men in the present.”13
From Anecdote to Evidence
These women’s stories aren’t unique. In April 2025, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published a report called “The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event.”14 The largest-known study of the abortion pill, it is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
The study found that 10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious or life-threatening adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion—far exceeding the “less than 0.5 percent” figure reported in clinical trials on the drug’s label. The EPPC concluded that “the FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.”
The Guttmacher Institute criticized EPPC’s “The Abortion Pill Harms Women” report, saying it “erroneously characterizes people seeking care at an emergency room or other health care setting during or after a medication abortion as a serious adverse event. However, an ER visit alone is not evidence of a complication.” Guttmacher further accused groups like EPPC of taking “efforts to conflate normal patient behavior with medical emergencies.”15
It’s worth noting for a moment how Guttmacher’s response resembles the side-effect-denying gaslighting that women have long said they experienced when talking to their doctors about birth control side effects.16 If Guttmacher took a closer look at the data EPPC used in its “The Abortion Pill Harms Women” report, they might see that “normal patient behavior” after taking the abortion pill and “medical emergencies” are, for too many women, one and the same.
An EPPC fact sheet noted that the “The Abortion Pill Harms Women” study “excluded a majority of emergency room visits to avoid overstating risks” and that “the emergency room visits included in the report are only those related to the chemical abortion, based on the diagnosis and procedure codes in the insurance records, and are counted only if treatment for a serious complication related to the chemical abortion took place.”17
In addition, of the high percentage of “other abortion-related complications” the EPPC report found, many involved surgical interventions such as dilation and curettage or operating-room procedures deemed severe or life-threatening—clearly not events women can manage alone in their homes.
This is not the first evidence pointing to higher emergency acuity (that is, requiring more urgent and involved medical response) following chemical abortion. A peer-reviewed study published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute in 2024 revealed that “both the number and acuity of [Emergency Department] visits following pregnancy outcomes are increasing. ED visit acuity following chemical abortion is persistently and significantly higher than for surgical abortion or live birth.”18
What’s more, a study in England reported that of the 248,000 women who between 2019 and 2021 “self-managed their medical abortion at home,” more than 14,000 required “treatment in an NHS hospital for [retained product of conception], a complication arising directly from the expected failure of the medical abortion treatment.”19 In 2020, 1 in 17 women who acquired mail-order abortion pills later needed hospital treatment.20
Perhaps this is why the World Health Organization considers a “safe abortion” to be one administered by a trained health worker, and categorizes abortions as “less safe” when performed “by an untrained person albeit using a safe method like misoprostol.”21
Regulatory Reckoning—or Regulatory Delay
After the EPPC report was released, in August 2025 a coalition of 22 state attorneys general called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reinstate safeguards for the abortion pill, urging that, if the FDA cannot reinstate those safeguards, it should consider withdrawing mifepristone from the market until the FDA “completes its review and can decide on a course of action based on objective safety and efficacy criteria.”22 The FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and HHS secretary Kennedy responded in a September 2025 letter stating, “this Administration will ensure that women’s health is properly protected by thoroughly investigating the circumstances under which mifepristone can be safely dispensed.”23
But reports suggest the FDA is delaying such an investigation until after the 2026 midterm elections. According to Bloomberg in December 2025, while Makary and Kennedy “have told lawmakers and state attorneys general for months that they are actively conducting a review of mifepristone,” no action is being taken. “Behind the scenes,” Bloomberg reports, “Makary has told agency officials to delay the safety review.”24 In response, prolife organizations such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have called for Makary to be fired for slow-walking the report while the abortion drugs remain widely distributed.
This delay has led some lawmakers to take the lead in investigating the safety of the pills. In January 2026, the Senate held a hearing called “Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” revealing a deep divide over the safety and regulation of medication abortion.25 Republican members and their medical experts argued that the removal of in-person dispensing requirements has created a medically dangerous environment where women face risks of hemorrhaging, sepsis, and psychological trauma without adequate supervision. Further, they highlighted harrowing accounts of “reproductive coercion,” where the ease of obtaining pills through the mail allowed abusers or traffickers to surreptitiously drug women, arguing that the FDA must reinstate strict oversight and “Black Box” warnings to ensure genuine informed consent.
In contrast, Democratic members at the hearing, along with abortionist Nisha Verma whom they invited to testify, characterized the claims as politically motivated attacks on “settled science,” asserting that mifepristone is safer than common over-the-counter medications. Claiming that telehealth is a critical lifeline for women living in areas where medical access is limited or in states with total abortion bans, they positioned the abortion pill as a safe and private way to access essential healthcare. Further, they claimed that the EPPC-documented harms resulted from flawed, non-peer-reviewed studies intended to justify a national abortion ban, and insisted that any complications or desperation seen in patients was a direct result of restrictive state laws, which create fear and prevent women from seeking necessary follow-up care in their own communities.
EPPC president Ryan Anderson and EPPC’s director of data analysis Jamie Bryan Hall coauthored a response in The Federalist, noting that “the Democrats’ witness accused us of committing ‘substantial errors’ and lacking ‘transparency’ in our study when, in fact, The Washington Post’s ‘fact checker’ went back and forth with us for multiple rounds of questions and ultimately published a review of our study that awarded us no ‘Pinocchios.’” Further, they wrote, “we—along with a majority of the U.S. Senate and nearly half of the U.S. House of Representatives—recommended that they conduct their own study, and the leadership of HHS and the FDA agreed to do so. How could anyone reasonably oppose this?”26
The Goal Is Abortion Access, Not Women’s Health
Prolife activists have for decades emphasized how the abortion lobby appears to prioritize the active promotion of abortion over women’s health or even women’s free choices. With the Pandora’s box of mail-order abortion pills having been opened, the redirection away from women’s health toward uninhibited abortion access has never been clearer. The only difference is that now it’s voiced by abortion supporters in addition to prolifers.
“The irony of this post-Dobbs world,” former Planned Parenthood Global employee Dee Redwine told NPR in 2025, “is that if it goes the way that I think it will [as] I saw in Latin America, in some ways abortion ironically will become more accessible, but less legal.”27 Whether or not its harms are documented and lead to it becoming illegal, “there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.”
This fatalistic attitude is echoed in the 2024 recommendations of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) on self-managed abortion (SMA), instructing OB/GYNs and other medical professionals to “apply a harm-reduction approach to reduce potential negative consequences associated with SMA,” since “complete elimination of that behavior is not a realistic goal.” ACOG added, “this approach aims to center patient autonomy by focusing on reducing potential negative consequences . . . instead of pretending that the behavior does not occur at all.”28
In other words, the abortion lobby’s PR emphasis on promoting abortion as healthcare is no longer the goal. Women aren’t seeking abortion pills for medical reasons anyway; by and large, women who take abortion pills are doing so too early in pregnancy to even have complications to encounter. Perhaps that’s why not one of the personal accounts I’ve read cited a medical reason for pursuing abortion pills.
While the abortion lobby’s imprimatur on abortion pills is bad for women’s health, a silver lining of this detached health emphasis could be that now we can return the focus of healthcare to what it really is—promoting healthy human development.
More Dangers of the Pill
Beyond regulatory failures, the pill’s mail-order availability has enabled deeply troubling abuses. A minor is able to obtain abortion pills online with ease, as documented by Students for Life.29 In a widely cited 2025 case, a boyfriend crushed the pill into a drink, forcing an abortion without the woman’s knowledge.30 In a 2024 case, a doctor lost his license after force-feeding his girlfriend a crushed abortion pill.31 Another man was caught swapping an abortion pill with what his girlfriend thought was an antibiotic regimen.32 Still another held his girlfriend at gunpoint, demanding she take the pill.33 Stories like these add legitimacy to findings from a 2023 survey by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, revealing that “close to 70 percent of the women who had abortions described them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values and preferences.”34 RIP “right to choose,” as today’s youth might say.
Meanwhile, unsupervised abortions raise additional ethical and environmental concerns. Human remains are flushed into sewer systems, treated as disposable waste. Leaders from Students for Life of America are lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency to include the abortion drug ingredients among common water pollutants.35 While the Guttmacher Institute claims the drug residue poses minimal environmental risk,36 the contrast with existing regulations governing the disposal of human tissue is striking. In states such as Ohio, human remains classified as infectious waste must be disinfected before disposal—standards that at-home abortions simply bypass.37
At the January Senate hearing, abortionist Dr. Nisha Verma and Democratic senators referred to this claim as a “conspiracy theory” and argued that focusing on wastewater was a “distraction.”38 But as more and more women are encountering their aborted children in the flesh with DIY abortions, unlike surgical ones, I can’t help but wonder if the growing numbers of those gaining a greater knowledge of the realities of ending a human life through DIY abortion might one day contribute to a turning tide in public opinion on abortion at large.
The Safety Narrative Starts to Fray
Even now, despite the post–Dobbs increase in mail-order abortions, there’s evidence that public confidence in the abortion pill is eroding.
The nonpartisan healthcare think tank KFF reported that 40 percent of Americans say they are “not sure” about mifepristone’s safety, while another 18 percent view the pills as either “very unsafe” or “somewhat unsafe.” That marks a sharp rise in skepticism about the pills since 2023, when just 9 percent viewed them as unsafe, and 35 percent said they were unsure.39
Meanwhile, abortion providers continue to market mail-order abortion as “private and safe,” while safeguards are stripped away, leaving women in such situations to manage hemorrhage, severe complications, and emotional distress alone at home.
The battle over the abortion pill is ultimately a battle over truth—about medical data, regulatory responsibility, and the real costs borne by women when abortion is reframed not as a serious medical event but as a consumer product to be self-administered.
In a strange full-circle moment, the abortion lobby that once invoked the horrors of self-managed abortion and demanded doctor-directed procedures now promotes at-home abortion as a comparable solution. It’s as if the hanger has simply been rebranded and distributed, leaving women to bear the burden on their own bodies, manage the aftermath in isolation, and seek medical intervention only when things go wrong.
Abortion advocates today often claim we are going backward in women’s health. On that point, they are right—though the regression is of their own making. Those of us who oppose abortion see this shift not as progress gone awry, but as the logical conclusion of a practice that has long dehumanized both mother and child.
NOTES
1. “International Safe Abortion Day: Standing Up for Safe, Legal, and Accessible Abortion Care,” Planned Parenthood of Orange & San Bernardino Counties, September 24, 2024, Planned Parenthood, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/plannedparenthoodorangesanbernardino/aboutus/blog/internationalsafeabortiondaystandingupforsafelegalandaccessibleabortioncare
2. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, “How MSF Is Expanding Access to Safe Abortion Care in Mozambique,” January 22, 2024, “Staff at these clinics now provide roughly 230 safe abortions per month …” https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/howmsfexpandingaccesssafeabortioncaremozambique.
3. Planned Parenthood. “The Abortion Pill.” https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/ theabortionpill
4. Kelly Baden, Joerg Dreweke, and Rachel K. Jones, “The War on Mifepristone: How Junk Science and False Narratives Threaten US Abortion Access,” Guttmacher Institute, October 2025, https://www.guttmacher.org/2025/10/warmifepristonehowjunkscienceandfalsenarrativesthreatenusabortionaccess
5. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “ACOG Suit Petitions the FDA to Remove Burdensome Barriers to Reproductive Care During COVID19,” news release, May 27, 2020, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, https://www.acog.org/news/newsreleases/2020/05/acogsuitpetitionsthefdatoremoveburdensomebarrierstoreproductivecareduringcovid19
6. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Questions and Answers on Mifepristone for Medical Termination of Pregnancy Through Ten Weeks Gestation,” updated January 17, 2025, https://www. fda.gov/drugs/postmarketdrugsafetyinformationpatientsandproviders/questionsandanswersmifepristonemedicalterminationpregnancythroughtenweeksgestation
7. Pam Belluck, “Abortion Shield Laws Are Expanding Telemedicine Access—and Raising Legal Questions,” The New York Times, February 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/health/ abortionshieldlawstelemedicine.html
8. Lifeline Pregnancy Help Clinic, “Abortion Pill & Ectopic Pregnancy,” January 7, 2024, Lifeline Pregnancy Help Clinic, https://lifelinepregnancyhelp.org/abortionpillectopic/
9. Caroline Kitchener, “Alone in a Bathroom: The Fear and Uncertainty of a PostRoe Medication Abortion,” The Washington Post, April 11, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ interactive/2024/abortionpillexperiencestories/
10. Danielle Campoamor, “What Is a Medication Abortion? 5 People Talk About Taking the ‘Abortion Pill,’” Today, April 10, 2023, https://www.today.com/parents/pregnancy/medicationabortionabortionpillexplainedrcna18774
11. Emma Specter, “What Is It Like to Have a Medication Abortion? 5 People Share Their Stories,” Vogue, November 13, 2022, https://www.vogue.com/article/ medicationabortion5peoplesharetheirstories
12. Marie Solis, “Give Yourself an Abortion With Pills Bought Online,” Vice, February 24, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/giveyourselfanabortionwithpillsboughtonlineaidaccess
13. Abby Johnson, “The Abortion Pill Turns Every Woman’s Home Into a Potential Site of Trauma,” Newsweek, February 27, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/abortionpillturnseverywomanshomepotentialsitetraumaopinion1783180
14. Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan T. Anderson, “The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event,” Ethics & Public Policy Center, April 28, 2025, https://eppc.org/publication/insurancedatarevealsoneintenpatientsexperiencesaseriousadverseevent/
15. Kelly Baden, Joerg Dreweke, and Rachel K. Jones, “The War on Mifepristone: How Junk Science and False Narratives Threaten US Abortion Access,” Guttmacher Institute, October 2025, https://www.guttmacher.org/2025/10/warmifepristonehowjunkscienceandfalsenarrativesthreatenusabortionaccess
16. Mira Swartzlander, “Medical Gaslighting, Mirena Crash and the Mind,” Biomedical Odyssey (blog), Johns Hopkins Medicine, November 20, 2024, https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs. hopkinsmedicine.org/2024/11/medicalgaslightingmirenacrashandthemind/
17. Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan T. Anderson, “FACT SHEET: Excluded Adverse Events in RealWorld Study of Mifepristone,” Ethics & Public Policy Center, May 6, 2025, https://eppc.org/ publication/factsheetexcludedadverseeventsinrealworldstudyofmifepristone/
18. James Studnicki et al., “Comparative Acuity of Emergency Department Visits Following Pregnancy Outcomes Among Medicaid Eligible Women, 20042015,” International Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health Research (Charlotte Lozier Institute, August 20, 2024), https://lozierinstitute.org/comparativeacuityofemergencydepartmentvisitsfollowingpregnancyoutcomesamongmedicaideligiblewomen20042015/.
19. “FOI Investigation into Medical Abortion Treatment Failure,” Percuity, October 28, 2021, https://percuity.blog/foiinvestigationintomedicalabortiontreatmentfailure/
20. CARE UK, “More Than 10,000 Women Needed Hospital Treatment After Using Abortion Pills,” December 2, 2021,https://care.org.uk/news/2021/12/morethan10000womenneedhospitaltreatmentafterusingabortionpills
21. World Health Organization, “Worldwide, an Estimated 25 Million Unsafe Abortions Occur Each Year,” news release, September 28, 2017, https://www.who.int/news/item/28092017worldwideanestimated25millionunsafeabortionsoccureachyear
22. Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Over 20 Attorneys General Cite EPPC Abortion Pill Study in Call for the FDA to Reinstate Safeguards,” August 13, 2025, https://eppc.org/news/over-20-attorneys-general-cite-eppc-abortion-pill-study-in-call-for-the-fda-to-reinstate-safeguards/
23. CNN, “Federal Agencies Are Reviewing the Abortion Drug Mifepristone,” September 25, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/health/mifepristonereviewfdahhsabortion
24. “FDA Slow Walking a LongAwaited Abortion Pill Safety Study,” Bloomberg News, December 8, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20251208/fdaslowwalkingalongawaitedabortionpillsafetystudy
25. CSPAN, “Witnesses Testify on the Use of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” January 14, 2026, https://www.cspan.org/program/senatecommittee/witnessestestifyontheuseofchemicalabortiondrugs/671632
26. Ryan T. Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall, “Democrat Witness Lies About the Abortion Pill’s Dangerous Side Effects,” The Federalist, January 19, 2026, https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/19/ democratwitnessliesabouttheabortionpillsdangeroussideeffects/
27. NPR, “The Rise of SelfManaged Abortion with Pills in the U.S.” (Podcast transcript), June 12, 2025, NPR, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1263508255
28. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), “SelfManaged Abortion,” Committee Statement No. 13, December 2024, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinicalguidance/committeestatement/articles/2024/12/selfmanagedabortion
29. Kristan Hawkins (post on Facebook), “One of our 16 year old Students for Life Influencers was able to access Chemical Abortion Pills online to prove how dangerous they are,” Facebook, posted December 2025, https://www.facebook.com/reel/1885769569484923
30. “Texas Woman Sues U.S. Marine Who Allegedly Spiked Her Drink With Abortion Pills,” NBC News, August 12, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/usnews/texaswomansuesmarineclaimingspikeddrinkabortionpillsrcna224297
31. Louis Casiano, “Ohio Surgeon Accused of Forcing Abortion Pills on Sleeping Girlfriend,” KTVU, December 10, 2025, https://www.ktvu.com/news/ohiosurgeonaccusedforcingabortionpillssleepinggirlfriend
32. “Man Pleads Guilty to Trick Pregnant Girlfriend Into Taking Abortion Pill,” CNN, September 10, 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/10/justice/girlfriendabortioncase/index.html
33. NBC News, “23YearOld California Man Faces Murder Charge After Allegedly Forcing Pregnant Girlfriend to Ingest Pills to Induce Miscarriage,” December 2019, reported via Facebook post by NBC News, https://www.facebook.com/NBCNews/posts/a23yearoldcaliforniamanisfacingamurderchargeafterallegedlyforcingh/3835811856438816/
34. Tessa Cox and David C. Reardon, “Study: Many Women Who Had Abortions Felt Pressured by Others,” Charlotte Lozier Institute, May 25, 2023, https://lozierinstitute.org/studymanywomenwhohadabortionsfeltpressuredbyothers/
35. Alice Miranda Ollstein and Ariel Wittenberg, “New AntiAbortion Campaign Takes Aim at EPA Water Testing Rules,” Politico, December 15, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/15/ newantiabortioncampaigntakesaimatepawatertestingrules00682098
36. Candace Gibson and Anna Bernstein, “Weaponizing Water: How the Campaign Against Medication Abortion Coopts Environmental Policy,” Guttmacher Institute, December 2025, https://www. guttmacher.org/2025/12/weaponizingwaterhowcampaignagainstmedicationabortioncooptsenvironmentalpolicy
37. Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (Ohio EPA), “Infectious Waste,” Ohio EPA, https://epa. ohio.gov/infectiouswaste (explaining that the Ohio EPA regulates the generation, treatment, packaging, storage, transportation, and disposal of infectious waste in Ohio under state law and administrative rules).
38. Senator Patty Murray, “Senator Murray Slams Republicans for Sham HELP Committee Hearing to Discredit Medication Abortion: ‘We All Know This Hearing Is Not About Safety, It’s About Banning Abortion Nationwide,’” press release, January 14, 2026, Office of Senator Patty Murray, https:// www.murray.senate.gov/senatormurrayslamsrepublicansforshamhelpcommitteehearingtodiscreditmedicationabortionweallknowthishearingisnotaboutsafetyitsaboutbanningabortionnat/
39. Audrey Kearney et al., “KFF Health Tracking Poll: Knowledge and Views of Medication Abortion,” KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), December 5, 2025, https://www.kff.org/publicopinion/kffhealthtrackingpollknowledgeandviewsofmedicationabortion/.
________________________________________________
Original Bio:
Mary Rose Somarriba is coeditor of the Human Life Review and editor-in-chief of Verily Magazine.
