A board-certified OB-GYN recently went undercover to order abortion pills online. She entered that she was under 16. She reported having an IUD, a major risk factor for life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. She indicated she was on blood thinners, had anemia, and had undergone three prior cesarean sections. Any one of these would halt a legitimate clinical encounter.
The website let her keep going. At every warning screen, she clicked “I understand” and moved on. Within minutes, she was approved. No physician ever spoke to her. No ultrasound was required. No one verified her age, her identity, or whether she was the one placing the order. Total time from start to checkout: less than 30 minutes. The cost: $150.
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The physician who ran this investigation was Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Her conclusion was blunt: This is not medical care — it is the abandonment of it.
She is not a lone voice.
Abortion did not become normalized in America because the public demanded it. Opinion has remained divided for decades. What happened was structural: Abortion was medicalized, reframed from a moral question into a clinical procedure, transferring authority to a professional class Americans instinctively trust. Once abortion was positioned as “healthcare,” powerful assumptions followed: doctors know best, medical decisions are private, and questioning a clinical recommendation is irrational.
The moral question didn’t disappear. It was declared irrelevant by captured institutions. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association adopted pro-abortion positions through internal politics, not democratic deliberation, then enforced conformity through professional pressure and training mandates.
That enforced conformity is breaking. I recently attended AAPLOG’s annual conference in Seattle and witnessed a movement building momentum. Hundreds of physicians and medical professionals gathered, not to protest, but to build. Medical students and residents attended on scholarship. The American College of Pediatricians and the American College of Family Medicine stood alongside them.
This was not an outlier. It is part of the groundswell of medical experts grounded in evidence and the foundational Hippocratic commitment to “first, do no harm.” Six organizations representing 30,000 medical professionals have signed a joint letter urging the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to address the dangers of unregulated abortion drugs. AAPLOG alone generated thousands of media mentions last year, deploying physicians as expert witnesses in courts, legislatures, and national media. They are building state-level medical coalitions, a speakers bureau, and, perhaps most consequentially, a Hippocratic Academy to train the next generation of life-affirming physicians who will practice for the next 30 to 40 years.
The evidence they are marshaling is formidable. Research from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that serious adverse events from mifepristone, including sepsis, hemorrhaging, and dangerous infections, are 22 times more frequent than the FDA acknowledges. The Charlotte Lozier Institute has debunked the claim that the abortion pill is “safer than Tylenol.” More than 60% of abortions in America now involve these drugs, distributed by mail with no physician interaction. Dr. Francis’s investigation demonstrated this in devastating detail.
The American public knows something is deeply wrong. A national 85 Fund survey conducted by CRC Research of 1,600 likely voters this month found that 67% support reinstating the FDA’s previous requirement for in-person dispensing of abortion pills. Seventy percent support requiring an in-person evaluation before and after. These are not partisan numbers: Majorities of men, women, Republicans, Democrats, and independents all agree.
Here is the lesson pro-life Americans can take to heart: If medicalization was the mechanism that normalized abortion, then medicine is the domain where that normalization must be challenged. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was the legal victory of a generation, but court victories that outpace cultural readiness are insufficient. We must now build the institutional architecture to sustain it.
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The claim that a medical consensus supports unrestricted abortion access was always a fiction maintained by institutional gatekeepers, not earned by evidence. No other drug carrying a black-box warning would be distributed without a physical exam, an ultrasound, or a doctor who has actually met the patient.
As a first step, the FDA should immediately reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement for these drugs, while doing its job to assess whether the dangers posed to women necessitate pulling this pill from the market altogether. But the larger story is this: A growing, credentialed, courageous community of physicians is fulfilling the Hippocratic tradition and insisting that medicine serve women rather than an ideology. They are the credible voices in this debate, and the days of their silence are over.
David Bereit is the executive director of the Life Leadership Conference.
