(LifeSiteNews) — Florida First Circuit Court Judge J. Scott Duncan of Santa Rosa County rebuked Planned Parenthood’s bid to toss a state lawsuit accusing the abortion giant of deceptive advertising for touting abortion pills as safe.
The suit, initiated last November by Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier, names the federal Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), its political arm Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF), and both entities’ state-level equivalents, Planned Parenthood of Florida (PPFL) and Planned Parenthood Florida Action (PPFLA). It alleges that the abortion giant’s campaign to promote abortion pills as “safer than Tylenol” is knowingly “deceptive” and “disastrous.” Planned Parenthood’s consistent hiding of the real facts, the suit maintains, violates the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and qualifies as racketeering under the Florida Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act.
Planned Parenthood sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, but Duncan ruled against the abortion provider in a May 27 decision.
“The defendants did not simply claim the abortion-inducing medications were safe; rather, according to the Complaint, they claimed they were safer than other medications,” the judge wrote, making the claim more than a mere opinion or “vague promotional language.”
“Now whether these statements are actionable or non-actionable may depend upon the context in which they were made,” Duncan continued. “However, that is a question the Court currently cannot answer. The Court is bound to the four corners of the Complaint. Accordingly, the Court declines to dismiss the Complaint in its entirety.”
In disputing the abortion lobby’s safety claims, pro-lifers point to an April 2025 analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) that concluded almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, plus similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation, as part of a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.
Most abortions are illegal in Florida as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, leading to abortion rates dropping significantly. But like all pro-life states, its laws are undermined by the nationwide distribution of abortion pills, which the federal government allows to be distributed by mail across state lines regardless of the risks, in violation of federal law – a directive started by the Biden administration and still not reversed by the Trump administration.
Mail-order abortion pills have become the abortion lobby’s most potent tool for preserving “choice” without Roe. The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, which Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills. Planned Parenthood’s 2024-2025 annual report boasts it alone committed 434,450 abortions, a record number for the organization and 8 percent more than the previous year.
Pro-lifers are currently waiting to see how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on legal challenges to the FDA’s lax abortion-pill regulations, which allow the pills to be dispensed without an in-person medical visit, before a long-awaited Trump administration review of the safety data is finally released.