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Accompanying NPR’s recent three-part podcast series examining the current state of abortion in the U.S. three years after the end of Roe v. Wade is an article zealously promoting online (and even over-the-counter) abortion pill use as safe, and portraying any doctor involvement as unnecessary.
The sale of the abortion pill over-the-counter is not currently legal.
Key Takeaways:
- NPR has published a series that promotes at-home abortion pills, with no doctors involved, as safe.
- A doctor quoted in one of the articles said reading numerous studies during COVID allayed her fears about the safety of unsupervised abortion pill use — but research on the abortion pill has been skewed for decades due to intentional deception.
- Another doctor claimed making women take the abortion pill in front of a clinician is “silly” — ignoring the reality that many women are coerced to take the drug after other individuals easily obtain it by mail, without having to prove their identities.
- The abortion industry is promoting the idea of over-the-counter abortion pills, which would make coercion, as well as injury, even more common.
- The abortion industry is offloading the management of complications to abortion patients and emergency rooms, instead of taking responsibility for patients. This is not providing medical care.
The Details:
The NPR article focuses on expanded abortion pill access as a supposedly necessary reaction to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the overturning of Roe.
But opening access to the abortion pill was not a natural result of changing times; it was a coordinated, decade-long effort by abortionists to reduce overhead costs and sell more abortions.
The abortion pill is a two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone is taken first; it acts to block the naturally-occurring pregnancy hormone, progesterone, depriving the developing child of nutrients. Misoprostol is taken after, causing contractions to expel the baby’s body from the uterus.
When mifepristone was approved for abortion in 2000, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ensured safety rules, called REMS, were in place to protect women. Now, those rules have been almost completely undone.
A coordinated effort to expand abortion
NPR claims:
Since the 1970s, legal abortions in the U.S. have taken place at brick-and-mortar facilities across the country […] But that began to change in the early 2020s. Between the COVID pandemic and the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, doctors had to rethink what a safe abortion looked like. The evidence for how to have safe and effective abortions outside the clinical setting was waiting for them.
But it wasn’t the “medical revolution” that NPR claims it was.
Abortionists and abortion organizations had already been working for more than a decade to turn the abortion pill, first approved under the Clinton administration in 2000, into an at-home DIY (and even over-the-counter) practice.
Here’s a timeline:
- May 2009-February 2011: Clinical trials begin “to assess the acceptability of home-use mifepristone.”
- 2015: Gynuity begins clinical trials for the “Feasibility of Medical Abortion by Direct-to-Consumer Telemedicine,” or “mail-order” abortion pills at select locations, including Planned Parenthood.
- 2016: The Obama administration weakens the FDA’s REMS safety regulations, removing the requirements 1) that women take the first drug (mifepristone) in front of a clinician, in-person at the location of a certified prescriber and 2) that the manufacturer report the drug’s non-fatal complications.
- 2016: Gynuity begins conducting its TelAbortion “trojan horse” trial, later admitted by the media group Fast Company to be a “work around” to the FDA’s REMS.
- 2017: Tara Health Foundation, an organization that pledged to fund the abortion pill on college campuses in California, publishes a 92-page strategy on its website which includes the push for “home use” abortion along with the elimination of REMS.
- 2018: Pro-abortion organizations publish a report suggesting the abortion pill “could be even further demedicalized through pharmacy dispensing and expansion of telemedicine models—or even making it available over the counter (OTC)—which have the potential to expand access greatly.”
- 2018: Pro-abortion Guttmacher publishes a report on “self-managed abortion,” claiming that the FDA’s REMS restrictions were not justified. The report indicated that, while DIY abortions would shift responsibility from medical providers to women, abortion businesses had no plans to relinquish the profits abortion brought them.
- 2019: Planned Parenthood vows to “expand[] its telemedicine services to increase access to medication abortion for patients living in remote communities.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic handed abortionists the opportunity they were looking for.
In April 2021, under the guise of the pandemic, the Biden administration’s FDA temporarily loosened the REMS safety regulations to allow limited mail-order pharmacy distribution. But just eight months later, by December of 2021, the Biden FDA had further weakened the REMS by eliminating the in-person dispensing requirement and allowing the abortion pill to be permanently shipped by mail — with no additional data proving the safety of such a move.
Reality Check:
NPR claims that allowing the abortion pill to be dispensed through the mail, and even the internet, is perfectly “safe” for women. In fact, some abortionists are claiming that the previous safety rules are completely unnecessary.
Downplaying the dangers of the abortion pill
Dr. Maya Bass, who once flew monthly from Philadelphia to Oklahoma to commit abortions, told NPR she found some of the rules surrounding the abortion pill to be burdensome — including the requirement for an in-person visit with a clinician to properly determine gestational age and to ensure the pregnancy was not ectopic before administering the abortion pill. She also gave her thoughts on requiring women to take the first pill in front of the abortionist.
“I have to watch you take this specific pill,” she said. “It is a little silly.”
But it’s only “silly” if you choose to ignore the reality of coercion.
Countless women have been forced and coerced into taking the abortion pill against their will — including the sister of Louisiana state Sen. Thomas Pressly, who was secretly drugged with abortion pills.
This incident inspired Sen. Pressly to introduce a bill in Louisiana to make mifepristone and misoprostol “controlled, banned substances.” That bill was signed into law in May 2024, in an attempt to prevent such a tragedy from happening again in the state.
And yet — in mid-2024, a New York abortionist illegally mailed the abortion pill to a mother who coerced her teenage daughter (who had been planning a gender reveal party) to abort her child. The teen ended up visiting the hospital due to complications from the abortion pill. When the state of Louisiana charged and attempted to extradite the abortionist, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and other officials in the state stopped them, invoking a state “shield law” enacted specifically to protect abortionists like this one, who intentionally break the laws of other states.
That same abortionist later mailed the abortion pill to a different Louisiana woman; she was 20 weeks pregnant, 10 weeks past the FDA limit for the abortion pill. AG Liz Murrill stated that the woman and her boyfriend “took the baby, wrapped it in a towel, and threw it in a garbage can” and then went to the hospital, where staff instructed them to retrieve the child from the trash.
Over-the-counter abortion pills would only make it easier for individuals with ill intentions to drug unsuspecting women or coerce them into abortions.
Clearly, Bass and other abortionists are more concerned about staying in business through abortion pill sales than providing actual medical care.
Offloading responsibility to women… and emergency rooms
Citing flawed research, Bass and fellow abortionist Jen Karlin, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, believe that having a doctor involved in the abortion pill process at all limits abortion access. (Gone are the days of “abortion should be between a woman and her doctor,” replaced by “We’ll just mail you some pills that are ‘safer than Tylenol.’”)
Karlin gave abortionists a survey asking them if they thought self-managed abortions could be safe, effective, and empowering. Bass participated in that survey, and said that while she initially worried about women’s safety, after reading two dozen peer-reviewed articles on the supposed safety and effectiveness of at-home DIY abortions without a doctor or medical facility, she changed her mind.
Those articles, they said, suggested that doctors weren’t necessary for most abortions.
NPR wrote, “The evidence summarized in Karlin’s fact sheet had been around for decades. But it took a global pandemic for that research to translate into policy.”
Karlin explained that during the pandemic, “All of a sudden, the health care profession is saying… ‘Do we really need that person to come in and do that test… that ultrasound?’ And lo and behold, there’s all this evidence already out there that no, they don’t.”
But that research was based on a pro-abortion agenda, which required lying and manipulation of the facts to make it appear that the abortion pill was safe.
Live Action Research Fellow Carole Novielli explained that for decades, the abortion industry has been instructing women to lie about abortion pill complication. Abortionists have been giving women the abortion pill and telling them to go to the ER if they experience complications — but to lie to hospital doctors as a way to bypass reporting requirements, saying they were naturally miscarrying. This means that those abortion pill complications will never be reported as such, because the doctors have been lied to, so they cannot notify the manufacturer, who then cannot notify the FDA.
This makes the abortion pill look safer than it actually is.
The abortion industry has encouraged women to lie about their abortion pill complications when visiting the ER for decades.
This deception has misled women—and the rest of the public—about the drug’s actual risks:
Sepsis
— Live Action (@LiveAction) June 17, 2025
The abortion pill is dangerous, and even its inventor knew that taking it alone at home would prove riskier for women.
A recent analysis of insurance data has found that nearly 11% of women suffer “serious adverse events” after taking the abortion pill — 22 times higher than the rate reported on the FDA’s label for the drug. This means one in ten women experience at least one serious complication from taking mifepristone within 45 days — far more than the “less than 0.5 percent” serious adverse events rate reported by the FDA on the mifepristone label.
And women are reporting their experiences in droves, but their cries are largely ignored.
The Bottom Line:
For two decades, the abortion industry has buried the truth about the dangers of the abortion pill for women, telling them to lie even when abortion was legal under Roe v. Wade so that they could build a narrative of ‘safety’ for the abortion pill, which has been erroneously marketed as “safer than Tylenol.”
In reality, women are suffering from the effects of the abortion pill and the trauma of birthing their dead babies — alone in their bathrooms.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]
