NPR, the media network that once played a recording of an abortion live on air, recently published a piece on the post-Dobbs landscape that seemingly glamorized the rise of women who are “managing their abortions without doctors.”

The piece highlighted the increase in chemical abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, noting that pro-life laws have prompted many women to seek alternatives to clinical abortions. Moreover, it detailed how chemical abortion drugs have become increasingly accessible — both from reduced restrictions on the drugs and also from underground or covert networks that illegally acquire and mail the pills.

Shockingly, the piece implied that such easy access was a boon to women. It also perpetuated the false narrative that chemical abortion is safe and easy.

“The evidence for how to have safe and effective abortions outside the clinical setting was waiting for them,” the piece reads.

One of the most shocking parts of the piece, however, is NPR’s glamorization of what pro-lifers have described as essentially the “black market” of chemical abortion pills: “sketchy” internet orders that are placed without prescriptions.

According to NPR, Elisa Wells, a “public health researcher” and one of the founders of an organization that is a “resource for self-managed, at-home abortion pills,” began looking into chemical abortion access in the U.S. with her team.

Wells and her team were allegedly motivated by questions surrounding online chemical abortion drugs — whether they were real, or would actually arrive.

NPR recounts:

“Wells and her colleagues set out to answer these questions. She found 18 websites selling pills. She recalls that the sites looked ‘a little sketchy,’ but she decided to test-purchase pills anyway. She entered her credit card information and waited, doubtful that they would arrive.

But a couple weeks later a package appeared at her door. Inside were the abortion pills. ‘It was amazing to me that these pills actually came,’ Wells says.

…Wells had them tested at a lab to check if they were real and presented her findings at the National Abortion Federation meeting in 2017.

Then Wells and her team revealed the results of the lab tests: the pills were real.

‘There was an audible gasp in the room,’ Wells says. ‘People realized how transformative that could be to abortion access in the United States.’ She even remembers some applause.”

It is fortunate that Wells and her politically motivated research team had the luxury of testing the “sketchy” drugs in a lab. The women who order these pills online and physically consume them, however, do not have the same luxury.

Pro-life medical professionals have highlighted that acquiring chemical abortion pills without an in-person consultation with a medical practitioner exposes women to the risk of missing an ectopic pregnancy, which could be life-threatening. Moreover, pro-life advocates have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the Food and Drug Administration’s own label for chemical abortion drugs says that one in 25 women who take them will end up in the emergency room.

They’ve also highlighted recent studies showing that 10.93% of women experience adverse events after taking chemical abortion pills. This statistic is 22 times higher than the rate listed on the drug label. Not only are the drugs themselves dangerous, but pro-life advocates have pointed to the horrifying reality that mail-ordered abortion drugs have been used by abusive partners in secret to induce an abortion in their girlfriends or spouses.

Yet the aggressive push of “experts” such as Wells and her team makes clear that the push for the increase of chemical abortion drugs, as well as the aggressive push to relax basic health and safety standards on them, was always partisan in nature.

No medical professional in good conscience could condone ordering and consuming drugs off the internet. And yet, one of the abortion “doctors” cited by NPR, Dr. Maya Bass, referred to commonsense restrictions on chemical abortion drugs as “silly.”

Bass, who found a calling in reducing abortion “stigma,” told NPR that she finds the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies regulating dangerous chemical abortion drugs “unnecessarily burdensome.”

Among the “burdensome” REMS is the requirement that women schedule an appointment with their medical provider to pick up the mifepristone. Others required that women swallow the drugs in front of their medical provider.

“Despite finding aspects of the REMS unnecessary,” NPR reported, “overall Bass considered the protocol to be good doctoring — until she encountered an alternative.”

However, Bass changed her mind after viewing a fact-sheet of studies allegedly showing the “safety and effectiveness” of managing a medication abortion without going to a clinic or even seeing a medical professional.

This awakening inspired Bass to work a “Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline,” which NPR laughably characterized as a way for her to “care for people having an abortion without politics shaping the process.”

Bass described her work for this hotline, and tele-abortions, as “the cutting edge of medicine.”

Both Bass and NPR were noticeably coy, however, in describing what chemical abortion actually is. NPR described misoprostol, one of the drugs in the two-drug regimen, as a drug that “causes contractions that empty the uterus.” Noticeably, neither Bass nor NPR note what the uterus is emptying: the remains of a preborn child. Similarly, NPR characterized Mifepristone as stopping “the pregnancy from progressing by blocking an important hormone.”

Pro-life medical professionals have more accurately characterized mifepristone as a drug that starves developing preborn children of nutrients, ending the life of the child. These details are noticeably absent from Bass and NPR’s story. Abortion activism was not.