Elizabeth Gillette didn’t know she was in danger. Like tens of thousands of other women who took the abortion drug, she wasn’t warned. “They promised it was safe.” In the most excruciating pain of her life, she was terrified. “I was completely alone. I didn’t have a nurse. I didn’t have a doctor. I had to shut my boyfriend out of the bathroom because there was so much blood.” She thinks back with horror, “I was so scared — I thought I was going to die.” But that, she says now, wasn’t even the worst part.
“The worst part was that nobody told me that I would actually pass the entire amniotic sac whole — that I would hold my dead baby. That I would see his eyes and his fingers. They told me that I would just see clotting and heavy period blood. They lied to me.” She pauses, her voice full of emotion, “When I close my eyes, I can still see my baby, floating in his little sac, dead. You don’t unsee something like that. You can’t.”
Instead of telling her the truth, the doctor said something Elizabeth can’t shake. “Women feel a great sense of relief after taking the medication. You will be able to move on.” Years later, Elizabeth can’t believe their casual disregard for what turned out to be the most harrowing experience of her life. “Nobody warned me of the drugs’ side effects. … There was no talk of a follow-up visit with the doctor — not even a phone appointment. After I was given the drugs, and they got my money, my case was closed.”
The emotional scars run deep, but the physical trauma is still hard for her to believe. “When my body was experiencing that amount of pain, I had no idea what was normal for this drug regimen. I felt like I had a fever. I felt nauseated. I couldn’t stand. My body was shaking and sweating. It lasted for hours. A heating pad, a heating blanket, Tylenol, Advil, nothing stopped the pain.”
“I deserved a doctor to inform me of the risks,” she insists. “To check on me and provide ongoing care. I deserved an extra appointment. I deserved a phone call. I deserved the truth. But I wasn’t given that…” It’s one of the reasons she’s telling her story. “When I first heard that the FDA was removing safety standards around abortion drugs, I was shocked. Without safeguards, women are going to face even more harm, emotional pain, and life-threatening complications. As traumatic and painful as the experience was for me, with the severe lack of care I received, the FDA is leaving women to suffer even more now. And that’s tragic.”
And there’s no excuse for it, senators like Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) argue — not under this administration. One of the first actions President Trump should have taken was protecting moms like Elizabeth, whose lives are literally in jeopardy under Joe Biden’s reckless guidance on mifepristone. It was his FDA that erased every single safeguard for the drug, throwing open the door to an abortion drug free-for-all — without a scrap of concern for the women who are bleeding out, rushed to the hospital with life-threatening infections, or undergoing surgeries because their dead baby wasn’t fully delivered.
Yet, here we are, more than a year into the second Trump White House, and the FDA hasn’t even started the study they promised on a drug that’s to blame for thousands of emergency room visits. And it’s not for lack of public outcry. Pro-life leaders in both chambers have pushed hard on Commissioner Marty Makary for months, only to hear the same tired excuses.
On Tuesday, senators held a private briefing with Makary to get to the bottom of the delay. They left angrier than ever. “I think that this safety study is a dead end,” a frustrated Hawley told reporters afterward. “I just think that FDA is not serious about it. I don’t think that they’re proceeding with any sense of urgency whatsoever.”
To Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Hawley was even more blunt. “I can tell you [that this briefing] was behind closed doors, which says a lot.” Pointing to the sky-high rates of chemical abortion — which at 63% has overtaken surgical abortion — he blasted the administration, not just for slow-walking the safety review but also for allowing blue states to continue mailing the pills into pro-life states without penalty.
“It doesn’t matter what your state’s laws are,” he vented on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” “it doesn’t matter if the voters of your state have said, ‘We want to protect life,’ this drug gets mailed in to every state in the union, often coming from overseas. You can get it on a website, frequently free of charge. This is where the fight to protect life is. Right now, it’s about mifepristone.”
And it’s not as if these common-sense policies — like a doctor’s supervision and follow-up visit — are radical ideas. The majority of Americans — 59% at last count — think that’s the bare minimum the government should require.
Frankly, none of this should be a heavy lift for the FDA, Hawley pointed out. “I want to see them put back into place the basic safety protocols from President Trump’s first term. They are his protocols. You have to get a prescription to have the drug. That ought to be a minimum. You have to go see a doctor to take the drug. That ought to be a minimum. None of those things are in place now. Joe Biden eliminated all of them,” he shook his head. “They did it to make abortion-on-demand feasible across the country. … They knew it would undermine any state laws. It would undermine, frankly, any Supreme Court decision. So Roe is gone. Praise the Lord for that. But abortions are going up because this drug is getting mailed in everywhere, and there are no restrictions on it.”
Meanwhile, it’s not safe, Hawley stressed. “This drug is very dangerous for the mother as well. A recent study of over 800,000 cases of the use of this abortion drug found that in 11% of the cases — more than one in 10 — the mother experiences a serious health crisis like hemorrhaging. We’re talking about trips to the emergency room, life-threatening conditions. None of that is currently on the label for this drug,” he wanted people to know. “So people are being lied to. Lives are being lost, the babies and sometimes the mother. And it’s time that we did something about it.”
Not surprisingly, he and other senators are fed up. This is the kind of stonewalling they’d expect from a Democratic administration — not the most pro-life president in history. “I have asked repeatedly in public letters written to the FDA, ‘Have you started the study? When are you starting the study? When will it be done?’ I’ve gotten zero answers from them. Zilch. Zero. There’s been public reporting in the news that the FDA has not even started the study yet. … I don’t know that this is even underway. And I just think at this point, this study, it’s vital — it should be done,” because, he added ominously, “in the meantime, abortions in this country are increasing. There are more abortions now than when Roe was the law of the land. And that’s because of chemical abortion.”
So why on earth are we living under the policies of a Democratic administration when Americans overwhelmingly elected a pro-life president, Perkins wanted to know? “I don’t know,” Hawley answered, equally baffled. “And to me, President Trump’s protocols on this when he was first in office are, again, a minimum of what we ought to go back to. They’re the right call. It would make a tremendous difference.” The senator thought back to when he cross-examined Makary. “I told him this to his face, I said, ‘You need to go back to President Trump’s policies.’ He promised me he would do a serious review of it. But I just don’t think that that review is even underway,” he lamented. “All I can say is we’ve got to do something to start protecting life in a serious way.”
Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity, is equally emphatic that it’s time for the Trump administration to undo the damage done by Biden. “It’s disappointing that the FDA is continuing to drag out the studies of the abortion drug mifepristone,” she told The Washington Stand. “While we wait for these results, countless unborn children’s lives will be ended, and many of their mothers’ bodies will be maimed and their hearts broken. The Trump administration does not have to wait until the review is conducted to mitigate the damage caused by mifepristone.”
As she explains, “The Comstock law currently makes it illegal to mail abortion inducing drugs, and this law not only includes mifepristone, but also other drugs intended to take the life of an unborn child. This law is already on the books — all the administration has to do is enforce the law, just like they have with so many other laws,” Szoch insists.
“In the meantime,” she implores, “Congress should act, and when they do, their action should not only be directed towards mifepristone but towards all drugs that are used to kill unborn children. All life is precious from the moment of conception, and every American should do all that they can to defend it.”
