(LifeSiteNews) — A 25-year-old nursing student is condemning the Trump-Vance administration for allowing abortion pills to remain accessible by mail, saying that taking the pills put her in a coma and almost killed her.
The fight over whether abortion pills can be mailed from pro-life states into pro-abortion states has become the most central battle for the pro-life movement since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Earlier this month, the movement scored a key victory.
READ: Supreme Court allows mail delivery of abortion pill to continue
On May 1, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Louisiana that pills-by-mail violated the state’s pro-life laws and issued a ruling that essentially reinstated the FDA’s pre-2021 requirement for an in-person appointment to obtain abortion pills.
However, on May 4, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an administrative stay pausing the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in response to a petition for emergency relief from two major pharmaceutical companies that produce the abortion pill, temporarily maintaining the status quo until May 11.
The Supreme Court has since granted another extension for several days, keeping access to abortion pills by mail open as litigation continues.
These stays prompted a heartfelt and disturbing editorial in The Hill by Shanyce Thomas on May 11 titled, “Near-death abortion drug experience highlights safety concerns.”
“As soon as I read the breaking news, memories flooded back to me of the hospital room where I nearly died at age 19,” Thomas wrote. “No number of slogans or activists could help me in that moment. What I remember is the blood, the pain and the terrifying realization that when everything went wrong, I was completely on my own.”
“Mailing dangerous abortion drugs with no in-person examination, no meaningful safeguards and no regard for state law was never about women’s health,” she continued. “It was about politics.”
Thomas writes that when she was 19, she took abortion pills, believing the abortion industry’s assurances that it was “simple and safe” to do so. “What happened instead nearly cost me my life,” she recalled.
She was nine weeks pregnant and saw her baby on the ultrasound – “a small body with arms and legs already forming.” She was told that the abortion pills would merely produce what amounted to a heavy period.
“This part is critical: My experience didn’t happen through the mail,” Thomas wrote. “It didn’t happen through an app or an online chat. I had an actual ultrasound for which I was physically present. There was at least some level of medical oversight. Yet even with that, everything went terribly wrong.”
After taking the second round of abortion pills, she began bleeding heavily and “passing clots” with unbearable pain. She went back to the clinic, where she was told everything was fine. The next morning, she was worse. Her father took her to the hospital, where doctors discovered that parts of her baby were still inside her and she needed emergency surgery. She went into septic shock.
“I don’t remember much of what happened next,” Thomas wrote. “I only know what doctors told me afterward. I spent about a month and a half in a coma as they worked to save my life. I was placed on an ECMO machine. I needed multiple blood transfusions. Doctors inserted a stent in my neck to access my veins. My parents stayed by my bedside the entire time, unsure whether I would survive.”
Thomas continued:
When I finally woke up, recovery was long and difficult. Nurses came to my home daily to manage a wound vacuum that helped my body heal from the inside out. Occupational therapists helped me relearn basic tasks like walking, showering and brushing my teeth.
The emotional recovery was just as real. I struggled with depression and trauma and spent time in therapy trying to process what had happened.… If I nearly died despite seeing a provider in person, it is important to ask how much more risk women face when black-box drugs are ordered online and taken at home without any in-person screening.
READ: Judge rejects lawsuit by teacher who says school punished her for exposing secret abortions
Permitting abortion pills to be mailed across America, Thomas noted, is deeply dangerous and playing with the lives of women. She now believes that the abortion pill should be banned – but at the very least, that it should not be so easily available.
“I survived what happened to me,” she concluded. “I was given a second chance in life. But when leaders like President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refuse to do something about the public health crisis of having these drugs in the mail, it sends a troubling message that experiences like mine don’t count.”
It is also important to note that Thomas’s baby did not survive. Decomposing body parts left inside her after she took the abortion pills almost killed her – but her baby had already been killed. As Live Action’s videos on the procedure reveal, the purpose of these pills is to destroy a human life:
According to a recent study, the abortion pill is also extraordinarily dangerous for women. “Over 850,000 chemical abortions. 10.93% of the women who took the drug suffered a serious adverse event like sepsis, infection, or hemorrhaging,” Ryan T. Anderson noted. “22 times higher than what the FDA label claims.”
