The Abortion Pill Has Never Abused Women. Men Do

By Lizz Winstead

Lizz Winstead

As Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearings for U.S. Attorney General wrap up this week, anti-abortion activists are demanding that he demonstrate his “concern” for women by protecting them from abusive men — by making it harder for women to obtain abortion medication.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America recently sent a letter urging Blanche to resolve a lawsuit brought by Louisiana challenging the federal policy allowing mifepristone to be dispensed by mail. This time around, the group is particularly focused on horrifying stories of men who secretly administered abortion pills to pregnant women or coerced them into taking the medication.

They specifically point to a recent case, an Army captain in Washington who secretly gave mifepristone to a junior enlisted soldier he was having an affair with. He pleaded guilty to intentionally ending her pregnancy, domestic violence, fraternization, and conduct unbecoming of an officer. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and dismissed from the Army.

In other words, the criminal conduct was identified as criminal. The man was prosecuted. The system did not shrug and say, “Welp, if only there were a law against secretly drugging pregnant women.”

Drugging anyone without their knowledge or consent is already illegal. Assault is illegal. Poisoning is illegal. Reproductive coercion is abuse. We do not need to restrict a safe medication to punish the people who weaponize it. Mifepristone did not abuse these women. Men did.

We know the far-right understands this concept because its members often eagerly explain that an inanimate object cannot be held responsible for the person misusing it. Every time someone says, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” after a mass shooting, an NRA lobbyist gets his horns.

But place abortion medication in a violent man’s hand, and suddenly the pill is the sole culprit? That selective logic would almost be funny if men being accused of drugging women weren’t in the news every day. 

We just witnessed activist and survivor Gisèle Pelicot force the world to confront what men did after her husband repeatedly drugged her and invited strangers to sexually assault her while she was unconscious. As a result, investigators are now exposing international networks where men exchange instructions for drugging and raping their wives and partners.

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Let me be clear: I am in no way endorsing the right’s bad faith argument about guns. The facts make that comparison collapse immediately, because the leading cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period is in fact, homicide, with firearms used in the overwhelming majority of these murders. 

And yet, there is no comparable conservative campaign to restrict access to guns because abusive men use them to kill their partners. In perhaps the mother of all ironies, the Trump administration is pushing to weaken gun regulations and make it easier for guns to be mailed directly to buyers without background checks.

Instead, anti-abortion activists are attacking a medication they still cannot prove is unsafe after two decades of trying. Mifepristone’s safety has been studied repeatedly across more than 25 years of use, with serious complications remaining exceedingly rare. Today, medication abortion accounts for nearly two-thirds of clinician-provided abortions in the United States.

Opponents cannot plausibly claim that banning abortion has stopped people from having abortions. So now they are presenting domestic violence as a side effect of women’s access.

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It is an old trick. When men abuse or attack women, society responds by restricting women. Don’t wear that skirt. Don’t walk home alone. Don’t leave your drink unattended. 

Now it’s: Don’t allow abortion pills to be mailed because a man might use them to commit a crime, as if abusive men are uncontrollable forces of nature. Since we apparently cannot expect men to refrain from drugging their partners, women must surrender access to medication.

Anti-abortion activists aren’t the only ones with stories to share. Reproductive health and justice advocates have collected abortion stories for years, and more recently, collected hundreds of stories from people describing what abortion medication made possible for them. “I was still emotionally and physically recovering from an ectopic pregnancy,” one person wrote. Another told us she was able to “finish graduate school and have two kids when I was ready with my partner.” While managing a pregnancy loss, another said the medication allowed her “to remove dead tissue from my body that could possibly cause sepsis.”

That is what mifepristone makes possible: survival, recovery, future fertility, and the freedom to have children when the time is right. But these kinds of stories rarely receive the same political attention because they aren’t sensational. They represent the everyday choices we have to make to build the lives we want. 

The manufactured horror stories are louder, but they do not point us toward the real danger: Male violence. 

Democratic senators were right to grill Blanche, the acting AG, about the Justice Department’s treatment of Epstein survivors and whether he would restrict access to the abortion pill — and his responses offered zero confidence, suddenly claiming he is “prohibited” from meeting with Epstein victims and doubled down on his pledge to end abortion by mail.

And nary a conservative demanded that Blanche explain how his Justice Department would protect people from reproductive coercion and intimate partner violence. Or whether it would vigorously enforce laws against sexual assault, poisoning, stalking, and domestic abuse. Or why the administration wants to make firearms more readily available to dangerous men.

But their silence tells us plenty.

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