Not every woman taking the abortion drug has a choice. Rosalie Markezich knows, because she’s one of them. When she missed her period and took a pregnancy test, she admits that even though it wasn’t planned, “deep down, I also kind of wanted it to be positive.” When she saw the line, Rosalie remembers, “the first thing I did was smile.” Her boyfriend, the world now knows, did not.
It was October of 2023. Rosalie waited a week to tell him, and for a few days, “it seemed like we were on the same page.” Out of the blue, things changed. “It was just like a 180 flip of a switch,” she tells people now. He told Rosalie he didn’t want the baby, even when she emphasized that she did. He started arguing with her, telling her a baby would ruin his life. Then, one day, a package of abortion drugs showed up in the mailbox in her name — even though they’re against the law in Louisiana and even though she’d never consented.
Rosalie tried lying, telling her boyfriend that she’d already taken them. “He did not believe me for one second.” So, she did the only thing she could think of: she stood her ground. “I want to keep it,” Rosalie declared. But he got angry, snapping and raising his voice. As someone who’d suffered domestic violence, she started to panic, sensing the situation was starting to escalate to a dangerous place. “[I] feared for my life and my child’s life.” So she swallowed the pills while he watched. “I felt pressured,” Rosalie says emotionally.
“My plan was to immediately go and throw them up,” she recalls. “And so, I started freaking out, having a panic attack. [M]y legs and arms all locked up and [started] shaking.” Rosalie got out of the car and ran to the bathroom, trying to get the pills out of her system. But it was too late. “The blood started coming, and at that moment, I knew [the] chances were not in my favor. And so, I just laid there bleeding, crying.” She spent the rest of the night on a towel in the garage, “soaked in blood.” Blood, she shudders, that didn’t stop for over a week.
Rosalie eventually got up and went to work with the kids that she loved. But she would go and look at those children and think, “I [will] never be able to hold the hand of my baby.” The mental anguish, she says now, “has never left.” “I am still haunted by the trauma, and I will mourn my child that I thought I was going to have [forever].”
A year and a half later, she knows that her situation could’ve been different if the laws of her home state had been enforced. If her boyfriend couldn’t have accessed the drugs outside Louisiana, Rosalie wouldn’t be telling her story at press conferences, to Congress, or the courts. She wouldn’t be the center of one of the biggest mifepristone cases in the last decade. “If mail-order abortion wasn’t a thing, I’m 100% sure I would have my child,” she insists now. “My then-boyfriend would not have been able to order these drugs if the FDA hadn’t recklessly removed the requirement for an in-person office visit before prescribing them. And if he had tried to force me to go to an abortion clinic to get these drugs, I would have told the doctor, ‘I do not want this.’ But I was denied of that opportunity.”
That, she says, is why she’s speaking out. “No woman should have to experience what I went through. And yet I’m hearing story after story of women who are placed in unacceptable situations like mine, because the FDA failed to protect them. And that’s why I’m fighting back,” Rosalie stresses. “I want to be a voice for those women and their babies, and I want to hold the FDA accountable for these destructive actions against women and their children.”
While nothing can bring back her baby, Rosalie’s case has the power to change how the government treats chemical abortion. On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Louisiana’s request to block the dangerous Biden-era policy on mifepristone that allows the drug to be shipped in the mail to any state, regardless of their pro-life laws. Thanks to Rosalie’s courage — and the work of state Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) and others — there’s a strong chance that, at the very least, women will have to see a doctor in person before the pills are prescribed.
Although the Supreme Court announced Monday that it will wait to enforce that requirement until it considers the legal arguments, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley explained to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins that pro-lifers shouldn’t be discouraged by the temporary order.
“It is quite typical for the court to enter what’s called an administrative stay so that the full court can consider the stay request. So [it’s] nothing unusual,” she reassured Americans who might not understand why SCOTUS is blocking the changes. “We expected Justice [Samuel] Alito to grant this administrative stay. And now,” Hawley stressed, “the really important part starts. Louisiana will file on Thursday a response to that application before the court. And we hope that the full Supreme Court will let the Fifth Circuit’s … reinstatement of those crucial protections for women continue.”
As Erin has reiterated for months, the Biden administration made this whole situation “infinitely worse” when it decided to relax the rules governing mifepristone. “Drugs can now be mailed to dorm rooms or homes without ever talking to, much less seeing, a doctor. … It’s unconscionable,” she argued at a press conference last month. “Make no mistake, abortion drugs are not about women’s health. They are reckless. … And when the Biden administration stripped away that last remaining safeguard [for prescribing them], they did so in the face of studies that acknowledged that more women would be sent to the emergency room, that more women would be hospitalized. And they did it anyway.”
The whole point of the Dobbs ruling was to return the question of abortion to the states. Dozens of them acted immediately, passing strong protections for the unborn and women. But now, thanks to Biden — and now, the Trump administration’s indifference — those democratically-enacted laws have been tossed aside, unconstitutionally.
“The state’s pro-life laws are utterly unenforceable” in this environment, Hawley underscored on “Washington Watch” Monday. “Nearly 1,000 abortions take place every month because pro-abortion doctors mail these drugs across state lines.” And while the Trump FDA has promised to study the drug and its shocking side effects (almost 11% of women experience “serious adverse events” from the drug, research shows), there’s no proof those studies are actually taking place.
“[A] year ago, they said they were going to review it,” Perkins reminded people. “Nothing yet. … So in the meantime, Louisiana has a right to act.”
Hawley underscored that point, suggesting that what Biden did blatantly undermined states’ rights. And yet, the fact that the Trump administration refuses to use its power to reinstate the FDA’s safety standards and stop the flood of abortion drugs to pro-life states continues to confound Americans. Radical governors like California’s Gavin Newsom (D) and New York’s Kathy Hochul (D) shouldn’t be determining the abortion policy of red states like Louisiana.
“This is just insulting, right?” Marc Wheat, general counsel for Advancing American Freedom, told The Wall Street Journal. Perkins had another word for it: “unprecedented.”
“You have Republican states that are challenging a Republican administration over this because their laws are being undermined. Pro-life voters are going to be wondering what’s going on when they head into the polls in November.”
