When The Abortion Pill Goes Wrong, These Pro-Life Groups Pick Up The Pieces

“It looks like a baby. It was on the ground moving.”

That is what an 18-year-old girl told a pregnancy center employee after taking an abortion pill she ordered online from overseas.

It is just one of the shocking incidents workers in PreBorn’s pro-life pregnancy center network have experienced as they scramble to help desperate women who show up seeking help after taking the abortion pill.

PreBorn founder Dan Steiner spoke to The Daily Wire about his group’s harrowing work. He said women often show up at his clinics “severely traumatized” after days of severe bleeding.

“I’m talking about their mattress being soaked with blood, and that’s very dangerous,” Steiner said. “That trauma is bringing them into our clinics, and it’s twofold. One is the bleeding, but even more traumatic is that they are delivering the baby on the floor, in their bathroom toilet.”

“They’re bringing this into our clinics, like wrapped in washcloths, you know, these little babies,” he said. “It’s traumatizing our clinic workers as well.”

Sometimes, the pregnancy center has an arrangement with a local cemetery to dispose of babies’ bodies in a dignified way. But “that’s not the case with a lot of our clinics,” Steiner said.

Afterward, he noted, women “have to go back to the scene of the crime, their own bathroom, every day for the rest of their lives.”

“This is just a nightmare on steroids,” Steiner said. “It definitely kills their baby, but it also kills their hearts.”

On top of this, women often end up with severe complications after taking mifepristone, the popular abortion drug.

The two-pill chemical abortion regimen — mifepristone, usually followed by misoprostol — aims to end the life of the unborn baby and expel it from the woman’s uterus. However, the drugs sometimes fail to expel all the fetal tissue, which can cause life-threatening complications.

A study released last month shows the abortion pill is many times more dangerous than the FDA claims.

More than one in 10 women suffer “serious adverse events” after taking mifepristone, which can include hemorrhaging, needing a blood transfusion, an emergency room visit, and even deadly conditions like sepsis, insurance claim data show.

This is about 22 times higher than what the FDA put on its label for the brand Mifeprex in 2023. The FDA cited clinical studies saying less than 0.5% of women suffered “serious adverse reactions” to mifepristone.

The pill also has a high failure rate. More than one in 20 women need a second abortion after mifepristone fails, the insurance data shows.

According to Steiner, the typical woman who comes to PreBorn for help is between 19 and 24, has multiple sexual partners, and likely does not know how far along she is in her pregnancy. That makes taking the abortion pill more dangerous, since it is only designed to be effective in early pregnancy.

Many women also change their minds after taking mifepristone, and frantically search online for how to reverse the drug’s effects and save their pregnancy.

Heartbeat International is a pro-life organization that reaches those women through its Abortion Pill Rescue Network, which has helped more than 6,000 women reverse their abortions with progesterone.

Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International, said that for most of the women who reach out to them, the experience of abortion was “not as promised.”

“It’s not ‘just a pill’ and it’s not ‘safer than Tylenol,'” he told The Daily Wire. “Once they begin to have significant symptoms, they sometimes call with deep regret and we must get them to care immediately.

Godsey recalled one mother, Sara, who took the abortion pill for her fourth baby because her boyfriend threatened to leave her if she did not.

“She realized her mistake and said it felt like a darkness had come over her,” Godsey said.

In desperation, the woman called the Abortion Pill Rescue Network’s hotline, and the nurse who answered connected her with a clinic that gave her progesterone.

The boyfriend kept his promise and left Sara and the children. But the baby, Isaiah, is now six, in kindergarten, plays soccer, and has a large extended family who “adore him,” Godsey said.

But not every story has a happy ending.

One woman took the abortion pill while carrying twins and delivered a “perfectly formed, deceased, tiny baby boy,” Godsey said. She called the Abortion Pill Rescue Network to stop the abortion and save her second baby, but it was too late — she quickly delivered a second deceased baby.

“That evening alone in her backyard she buried her tiny babies,” Godsey said. “I often think of her when I hear the lie that abortion empowers women. Instead, it often brings them to their lowest point.”

Medication abortions are far more common than surgical abortions. Medication abortions made up 63% of all abortions in 2023, up from 31% in 2014, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

The abortion pill is likely the main factor driving up the country’s total number of abortions in recent years, even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Abortion advocates have argued that the abortion pill should be more available to order online now that some Republican-led states ban abortion.

A few months before Roe was overturned, the FDA scrapped the requirement that women must obtain abortion pills in-person from a health provider, allowing them to obtain them online through the mail.

Steiner said the FDA engaged in “ideological, intentional ignorance” on the dangers of mifepristone.

“They’ve known it all along. They would have to know it all along,” he said. “If it was Xanax and women were hospitalized because of taking Xanax, pull it!”

Steiner said that short of pulling mifepristone from the market, he would like to see it slapped with a black box warning, the FDA’s most serious warning. He would also like to see the Trump administration enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that criminalized mailing abortion material.

Mifepristone was approved by the FDA in 2000.

Godsey slammed the FDA as well, saying the agency has relied on “highly controlled clinical trials performed by the abortion industry.”

“No one even knows how many abortions are happening or how many women are being harmed,” he said. “This isn’t healthcare, and women deserve better.”