America Doesn’t Want to Know About Abortion Pills

‘I honestly don’t know how it’s possible to stop at this point.”

A longtime pro-life activist said this to me recently, in an exchange about abortion pills.

And oh, what an honest point that is. Abortion pills can’t be stopped.

Don’t worry, that’s not the end of my statement.

There’s a fury on the right — or at least the parts of it still opposed to legal and easy-to-access dangerous abortion in the United States — about the Trump administration’s refusal to roll back Biden-era mail-order abortion-pill dispensing. The Biden change was supposed to be a Covid thing. Anyone who has ever paid any attention to life — and the life of abortion in America — could have guaranteed you that the Covid change was not the endgame, however. But this White House is all too happy to have wiped its hands of abortion, being able to claim the end of Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court as its right-wing triumph. And fair enough. It was at pro-life gatherings that I heard The Donald being declared “the most pro-life president” ever. Of course, the truth is more complicated, as now everyone is admitting. The head of the Federal Food and Drug Administration just resigned, and some groups hope that means a change in policy. But even if it doesn’t, a court will intervene, another administration will be elected. And it’s not like this one is stable on principles.

But the frustration — anger even — while understandable also exposes the limits of politics.

Here’s what we don’t talk about all that often when it comes to abortion, because the hurt and accusations and manipulations are so loud and all-encompassing and because no one really wants to talk about it. Few of us want to think about it. I can state this based on consistent polling over the years. And I can testify as a human on earth who has not only known a few other humans but who spends time around abortion clinics and in places in cities where dark and light clash and the truth of human misery is revealed and, thanks be to God, sometimes sets people on a road to healing. And so, while political and advocacy organizations issue letters and press releases and put money into particular campaigns — and against others — the rest of humankind goes about its business, hoping abortion doesn’t touch them or their loved ones. Or doesn’t again. Or doesn’t reveal itself.

And the more abortion is in the news and the more abortion is seen, the trickier it is to avoid thinking about it. The next time you walk into your local pharmacy to pick up your blood-pressure or thyroid medicine — or maybe you, too, are one of the many on anxiety medication — you may very well be in line with a woman picking up her abortion pills. No go!, you may be thinking. You live in Texas or Louisiana. Women can’t have abortions in states like these. That’s, of course, preposterous. People are ordering abortion pills the same way they might buy the latest kitchen gadget from Amazon or a book (for some of us dorks who were part of the original Amazon slaves). And I say “people” not because I’m going to try to convince you that men can get pregnant: We know that men are ordering pills and coercing abortions. Some of these stories become criminal matters, but we have no idea how many men are doing this. We don’t even know how many chemical abortions are happening, period. Abortion numbers are infamously slow and inaccurate. And ever more so. If women find they are having complications from chemical abortions, they are being encouraged to show up in an emergency room and lie. Say you were given medication for a miscarriage, they are told. The abortion businesses don’t want danger tracking back to them.

What abortion in America looks like these days — four years after the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case threw out Roe — is not just an ugly, inconvenient reality. The obtaining of abortion pills today is becoming all too convenient, too convenient to reverse.

Pro-lifers used to pray outside abortion clinics as a standard witness and outreach, hoping women would receive a hand of support. But pro-life vans with ultrasound machines aren’t too helpful as last lines of defense of the motherhood of the woman and the life of the child when you don’t have a brick-and-mortar abortion clinic to park across the street from.

So what do we do? We look young women and young men in the eyes way before they ever have sex. We celebrate their birthdays and with that, each day of each year, their unique gifts. That’s not the stuff of gold-star self-esteem but reverence for the gift of life. Each one of us is unique. As we mature, we tend to come to realize that there is nothing new under the sun — as painful and challenging as our crosses are, we are likely not alone in carrying them. My mistakes? Sorry, Self, but you’re not all that inventive. They’ve been made before. And yet, the Creator of the universe wanted you and your successes and me and my mistakes to exist in the world, at this time. It’s not until we can appreciate that as naturally as we breathe oxygen that we can figure out what to do with the widespread, anonymous access to abortions without medical oversight from sea to shining sea 250 years after a Declaration heralded life as a good to be protected.

Am I Debby Downer on the nation’s birthday festivities? Perhaps. I’d like to think, too, a reality check that keeps us from being tripped up so much in the temporary fights that we miss the big picture of a flourishing life. A life each one of us is made for — if only given a chance at life.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.