Since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, the nationwide number of abortions has, unfortunately, only risen from roughly 930,000 in 2020 to an estimated 1.1 million last year. The Supreme Court decision that defederalized abortion took a crucial first step toward eradicating the practice nationwide, but that alone was never going to work. About a dozen states have since banned abortion. It’s progress, but you won’t see much positive change in practice.
For starters, abortion bans passed in states that already had relatively few abortions. Most faced little opposition because the people most affected were unlikely to seek abortions in the first place.
To make matters worse, abortion pills, especially mifepristone, have stopped abortion numbers from dropping. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions are being performed through medication because these pills have become shockingly easy to acquire. Women can bypass state laws, since the medication doesn’t require a doctor’s visit. They can schedule telehealth appointments with someone from out of state and then get the drug shipped straight to their doorstep.
People can obtain these drugs so easily, in fact, that some ordering mifepristone aren’t even pregnant, or aren’t even women at all. And men who want abortion pills might have more nefarious reasons.
For example, take a certain former West Point cadet, likely only there because of his father’s connections. He was dating a woman also enrolled at West Point and subsequently got her pregnant. At the time, the academy prohibited having children, and the woman would have had to leave. To her credit, she wanted to keep the baby.
The young man, however, was not happy about this and attempted to convince her to abort the baby. When she refused, he ordered abortion pills, concocted a mystery shake laced with sedatives, and force-fed her both the sedative shake and the abortion pills, taking away her agency and killing the child against her will.
The physical and psychological trauma this event undoubtedly left deep scars that will likely take a long time to heal. Meanwhile, the guy got off scot-free between 2022, when his horrible actions occurred, and this year, when a federal court finally charged and convicted him.
Unfortunately, many others like him want to harm women to save face for their own mistakes. Mifepristone proverbially sits on every street corner, enabling these men, when it should be kept under constant lock and key. Studies have shown that even if taken “safely” and legally, mifepristone can produce side effects that threaten the well-being of the women taking it. Roughly 11% of women show these side effects, a significant number when you consider the thousands who take these pills every year.
Abortion has been a quietly catastrophic development over the past 50 years, and unfortunately the pro-life movement has yet to move the needle nationwide. The current administration’s FDA can genuinely protect women nationwide by heavily restricting abortion drugs, and stories like the one above should push it to restrict all abortion drugs as much as possible. If the Trump administration and the American people as a whole want to protect women from the dangers of abortion and save millions of babies’ lives, they must first win the fight against the pills.
