A man from the United States made the following post on Reddit under the headline “My girlfriend saw the fetus come out at 17 weeks”:
I’m in dire need of some advice. My girlfriend and I of 6 months discovered she was pregnant for 4 months and we found out just a few weeks ago, and honestly we were thrilled until reality set in. We talked for about a week deciding whether to keep the baby or not…
Due to our cultural, family, social, and economic conditions we decided to abort. We’re in a very long distance relationship and both University students.
She’s taken the medical pill route alone, went through the pain alone and all of a sudden a fetus appears. I was shocked so I can only imagine what she felt. I believe due to my ignorance I had no idea this would have happen [sic].
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She’s still in the midst of pain and bleeding and to me what looks like border line [sic] depression. She cries to me on the phone asking herself if we made the right choice and if God would ever forgive her. She’s always wanted a child moreover a son so… as her partner, what can I say?
I too didn’t know this was so hard, how much more can I help her? Am I doing enough? We talk every day but it doesn’t feel like I’m doing enough for her.
The photo at the top of this post is of a preborn baby at 16 weeks.
Here is an ultrasound of a preborn baby at 16 weeks:
So this child was fully formed and even recognizable as a boy or girl (it seems to be a boy in this case).
You may be wondering what doctor gave the abortion pill to someone who was 17 weeks pregnant.
The abortion pill is definitely not recommended that late in pregnancy. The FDA only recommends it up to 10 weeks. Some Planned Parenthood facilities prescribe it up to 12 weeks. But at 17 weeks, any legitimate doctor would agree that it was too late for the abortion pill.
In fact, a pregnant person that far along would need a D&E procedure rather than a first-trimester suction abortion.
The poster does not say where he and his girlfriend got the abortion pill. If they did get it from a doctor, that doctor needs to be shut down.
But they may never have seen a doctor at all. They might have ordered the abortion pill online.
Ordering the Abortion Pill Online
Many pro-lifers don’t realize how easy it is to order the abortion pill online. There are two organizations, Women Helping Women and Women on Web, that will ship the abortion pill anywhere in the United States, including states where abortion is restricted.
All that is required is an Internet connection, a credit card, and a 10-minute consultation—and that’s not the only option.
There are innumerable private pharmacies, all based overseas, where anyone, male or female, can order the abortion pill. There is no consultation or screening, just a form to fill out.
Sydney Calkin, in her 2023 book Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders, listed just a few of the websites she found selling the abortion pill after a simple Google search:
AbortionKits.com, AbortionPillRX.com, BestAbortionPill.com, BuyMifeprex.com, MifegestKit.com, MTPkit.com, RU486pills.com, and SafeAbortionRX.com, to name just a few.1
Some online vendors sell abortion pills for as little as $50 – a fraction of the cost of getting them through an actual abortionist. Planned Parenthood, for example, charges an average of $580 for the abortion pill, and other facilities may charge up to $800.
An abortion pill purchased at Planned Parenthood, then, could cost over 11½ times more than one purchased through an online pharmacy.
The Difficulty of Stopping Abortion Pill Imports
Buying medication, any medication, online without a prescription is illegal in the United States. But no one in the FDA is currently trying to intercept abortion pills – and even if they were, they are woefully unprepared to do so.
In 2017, 275 million packages came into the United States from foreign countries. But the FDA has only 22 import investigators spread out among nine American international mail facilities.2
In fact, the FDA states that it can inspect less than 0.18% of packages assumed to contain drugs that pass through international mail facilities.3 This includes all drugs, even fentanyl and other opioids.
The FDA’s inspection program is underfunded and understaffed, and by their own admission, they catch only a tiny fraction of 1% of drugs that come into this country through the mail system.
Calkin summarizes the situation:
The available evidence suggests…that law enforcement efforts to prevent self-managed abortion with pills are largely futile…
Medication abortion moves in ways that make it difficult to detect and intercept.
The transnational pipelines that move goods from one country to another have reduced the significance of physical borders and contributed to the mobility of pills.
It is easier than ever to buy medication abortion online, whether from online pharmacies or telemedicine abortion providers based outside of the United States.4
Indeed, her entire book documents how easy it is to distribute abortion pills in places where they are illegal.
Even if law enforcement wanted to crack down on vendors that sell the abortion pill, there is little they can do. The pharmacies are in other countries and out of US jurisdiction. The United States cannot shut them down or put them out of business.
Often, the websites are hosted overseas as well, and there is nothing law enforcement can do to take them offline. Even in very rare cases when they do manage to take a website down, the online pharmacy immediately purchases another domain or domains on the cheap and puts the website right back up, possibly under a different name.
A simple Google search, a credit card, and $50 in the bank are all a person needs to get the abortion pill delivered to their door. Because of this, official numbers on abortions in the United States, such as those from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, are only the tip of the iceberg.
There could be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people ordering the abortion pill online every year. We have no way of knowing.
Responses from Reddit
On Reddit, some people responded to the anonymous boyfriend’s post.
One man wrote about a similar experience:
Hey bud me and my girl went through this not too long ago. You just gotta be there. Be kind, be gentle and be her rock. Me and my girl are on week 2 and she’s still in a funk and she’s still going through her emotions. It’s been rough but we are getting through it.
Every comment I saw was in support of the girlfriend’s decision. I didn’t see any comments from pro-lifers or any links to abortion recovery organizations. Many of the commentators weighed in on the statement about God’s forgiveness.
One person wrote:
Unfortunately, when they are late abortions, the product is more formed.
Just try to remind her that she didn’t do anything wrong, that God isn’t angry with her because he understands why she made the decision not to continue with the pregnancy.
Another wrote:
Yall absolutely made the right choice. There will probably be better opportunities in the future where yall can provide a better life at a better time. If your god is just, they will understand and forgive yall.
It’s normal to feel depressed. It’s a traumatic experience. But it sounds like yall made the best decision for yourselves. What kind of a god couldn’t understand that.
Another person recommended the group Faith Aloud, which is a coalition of pro-abortion pastors that believe nothing is wrong with abortion and offer validation to abortion patients.
Pro-Abortion Religious Beliefs
Another person weighed in:
I think it was a merciful decision for not just a potential future child, but also for her and her future family. I know people who have gone through this before and it ended up being a blessing in disguise.
This person offered some theology:
Also if she’s Christian and is experiencing suffering due to the false rhetoric around when life begins, I would show her this bible quote: Genesis 2:7 Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
Basically it means life begins when you take your first breath of air.
This religious opposition to abortion is relatively new and disputed by many religious scholars.
As a nonbeliever, I won’t attempt to discuss biblical interpretation, but I can debunk the claim that religious opposition to abortion is new.
Shane Claiborne, in his book Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person, researched what early Christians thought about abortion. He writes:
Of the prominent leaders and thinkers in the early church, eight mention abortion in eleven different writings (so some of them mention it multiple times). In every instance, they unequivocally condemn it.5
One example can be found in The Didache, an early Christian text that provided instructions for Christian groups. Scholars estimate it was written between 70 and 100 A.D., but some believe it dates back even earlier.
It says:
“You shall not murder a child by abortion.”6
Another example is the Epistle of Barnabas (circa 100 A.D.). Barnabas was a prominent early Christian. Although his writings weren’t added to the Bible, they were influential in his time. He wrote:
You shall love your neighbor more than your own soul. You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion: not again, shall you destroy it after it is born.7
So, Christian opposition to abortion is not new. Rather, it dates back to the early days of Christianity. Members of the early church seemed to agree that abortion was wrong. There are no surviving early Christian documents supporting it.
Finally, another commenter on the post said the following:
Tell her that when she is ready she can ask for that soul to make it’s way back to her. It isn’t gone, you both said “not now” and when you are both ready, invite it back to you with love.
This is far from the first time I’ve encountered this religious belief. So far, I’ve only seen it expressed by pro-abortion people, not pro-lifers. Often, it’s used to justify abortion before the fact. I’ve written about this here.
I hope that the post-abortive woman mentioned in this post finds peace. What a horrible shock it must be to deliver a fully formed dead baby after taking the abortion pill. She and her boyfriend had no idea what they were doing.
It’s tragic that a baby died, and it’s tragic that a woman has been emotionally traumatized. And we don’t know how many times things like this happen. There could be a lot of traumatized women and couples out there.
Footnotes
1. Sydney Calkin Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023) 38
2. Ibid., 80-81
3. USFDA “US Food and Drug Administration and the International Mail Facilities” quoted in Sydney Calkin Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders, 81
4. Sydney Calkin, 87
5. Shane Claiborne Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023) 75
6. Didache 2, quoted in Ronald J Sider The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012) 19
7. “Epistle of Barnabas” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, quoted in David P Gushee Introducing Christian Ethics: Core Convictions for Christians Today (Canton, MI: Front Edge Publishing, 2022) 217
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
