Marjorie Dannenfelser serves as president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She has been called “the woman who brought down Roe.”
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Late last Friday, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice asked a judge to dismiss Missouri v. FDA, a case brought by pro-life states over FDA rules that allow abortion drugs to be prescribed online, without doctors ever seeing or speaking to the actual patient. These rules risk women’s health, enable abuse and coercion, and effectively nullify all pro-life laws at the state level. In this lawsuit – it’s not the only one – the Trump DOJ argues that the policy should stand indefinitely until the FDA decides what, if anything, it will do.
The vast majority of Americans think women should be required to see a doctor before taking abortion drugs. In every poll where it’s been asked, this has been by a wide margin – including large majorities of independents, suburban women, and Gen Z, as well as nearly half of those who call themselves pro-choice. These requirements were standard for years, until, citing COVID, the Biden administration effectively removed them a few months into his term.
That Biden-era policy still stands today. As a result, throughout the country, abortion is de facto regulated by activist groups in the states with the most lax laws, who ship drugs nationally, regardless of the laws in the state where the patient lives. Many of these groups will prescribe to anyone who fills out an online form, without even requiring a video or phone call. Some advertise that they’ll send these drugs “in advance” to women who aren’t even pregnant.
These groups have no idea of the woman’s medical situation, or the actual age of the baby, creating serious health risks for the mother. Nor do they have any real confirmation of who filled out the form in the first place. Stories of abusive husbands and boyfriends obtaining these pills and forcing them on their unwilling partners have become sadly commonplace. Most recently, a baby girl in Texas named Presley Mae was delivered stillborn after her father slipped the drugs to her unwilling mother in secret.
Abortion drugs, to be clear, are not like “Plan B” or the “morning-after pill.” They are designed to abort unborn children much, much later. While the FDA’s own limit for the drugs is 10 weeks, the groups who send these pills often say they will provide them through the third month of pregnancy. Some emphasize – for “informational purposes” – that the pills continue to be “effective” until the fifth or sixth month, at which point the baby might survive a usual dosage. After 18 weeks, one group warns women that they may see “spontaneous gasping or movements” from the baby, but notes that these “typically stop on their own[.]” Of course, whatever their nominal limits, these companies have no way of verifying the baby’s age without an actual examination.
Trump’s DOJ argues, among other things, that pro-life states suffer insufficient harm from FDA rules (despite the effective nullification of their own state protections) to even be able to sue. They’ve also argued that some victims of this regime – women whose boyfriends filled out the form, obtained the pills, and forced the drugs upon them – shouldn’t have standing to sue without proving that it’s likely to happen again. On top of that, they say, the FDA is monitoring the situation, a full review will take place eventually, and that action is unwarranted until the review is finished at some indefinite point in the future.
The best indication we have for the timeline for this review is reporting from last year that Dr. Marty Makary, the head of the FDA, is waiting until after the midterms to decide whether to act. This wouldn’t necessarily be surprising, but it would be enormously ill-advised. According to a recent national polling from Cygnal, not only do the overwhelming majority of Republicans support returning to the old status quo and restoring in-person visits, but around a third of them would be less likely to vote in the midterms if Republicans weaken their dedication to these and other pro-life policies.
That would be a disaster. In midterms, even small mistakes can lead to large losses, and seriously demoralizing a third of your base would be no small mistake. For our part, we’re planning to spend $80 million this cycle trying to keep a pro-life majority in the House and Senate. But spurning a third of your base to avoid being on the winning side of a 70-30 issue makes that goal unnecessarily difficult. This may be why nearly every Republican in Congress who is up for re-election has already explicitly asked the administration to change its tune.
In the meantime, each month of inaction means around 10,000 babies like Presley Mae will die – just in the states with the strongest pro-life laws. Abusers will continue to get their hands on these lethal drugs. And countless women and girls will be sent to the emergency room with serious complications.
Pro-life states are right to sue – the FDA, as the administration has already admitted elsewhere, can end this situation immediately if they want to. The harms are real and serious. And failure to act risks not just the midterms, but hundreds of thousands of lives. The fact that Trump’s DOJ is siding with the pro-abortion lobby to get these cases thrown out is a disgrace.
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The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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