(LifeSiteNews) — The pro-life organization Live Action has released the findings of a new investigation into how abortion pills are distributed in the United States, adding to the growing body of evidence that the abortion lobby’s favored method of preserving “access” is dangerous to the very women they claim to help.
On January 22, the group held a press conference to highlight its new white paper and video report on the matter, elaborating on the thesis that the pill “not a medication; it is fundamentally a mechanism of death.” The paper offers a broad overview on the history, manufacturing, regulation, and risks of the abortion pill, offering a comprehensive, one-stop resource on the subject.
“According to the FDA, since 2000, approximately 7.5 million women have taken the abortion pill to end the life of the child in their womb in the United States,” the report says. “The FDA identified thirty-six deaths of women associated with the abortion pill. The FDA caveats this by stating, ‘The adverse events cannot with certainty be causally attributed to mifepristone…’” But Live Action goes on to detail two examples of young women who died shortly after receiving abortion pills, Holly Patterson and Alyona Dixon, as well as two who suffered severe adverse reactions, Shanyce (septic shock and an infection requiring a partial hysterectomy) and Leslie Wolbert (severe pain and bleeding followed by the psychological trauma of delivering and flushing her baby).
“In 2017, the United States saw the end of a long-term decline in abortions, with numbers beginning to tick upward once again each year,” the report says. “By 2020, abortions had increased nearly 8% from 2017. In February of 2025, Guttmacher Institute’s estimated abortion data analysis revealed a whopping 648,500 abortion pills sold in 2023 alone, which translates to an abortion pill count of 54,042 monthly, 1,777 daily, 74 hourly, and one abortion by pill every 49 seconds in 2023.”
“A study from September 2025 quoted authors affiliated with the Guttmacher Institute asserting that telehealth abortion ‘has contributed to the overall increase in abortions in the US,’” it continues. “Based on a conservative estimate of 63%, it is projected that more than 664,000 abortion pills were utilized in 2024.”
The accompanying video report features phone calls to Planned Parenthood locations inquiring about abortion pills. It reveals that no meaningful review occurs before the abortion giant agrees to mail out abortion pills; the age of an unborn baby is not checked, medical contraindications are not screened out, counseling is not done beforehand, follow-ups are not performed, and pills will even be mailed to alternate addresses to avoid parents discovering them.
“By failing to require any safety measures, Planned Parenthood (and other abortion pill vendors) functions as a drug dispensary instead of as a medical provider for patients,” Live Action says. “This process is putting women at increased risk should they experience any abortion pill-related complications, including hemorrhage, incomplete abortion, or life-threatening infection.”
The group calls on the federal government to promptly “suspend the approval of mifepristone as an abortifacient and prohibit the distribution of abortion pills through mail-order services, telehealth platforms, and retail pharmacies, and limit access to mifepristone to settings where in-person medical evaluation and follow-up care can be carried out,” as well as restore comprehensive reporting requirements for adverse events.
Mailing abortion pills across state lines to be taken in complete privacy has been one of the abortion lobby’s top methods for undermining state pro-life laws, regardless of the medical risks the pills carry for women, which are compounded by taking them without medical professionals on hand to immediately deal with complications.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
Questions are currently swirling over when and how the Trump administration will handle the problem. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to weaken the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that he would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.
Some pro-life leaders have called for the firing of U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over reports he is intentionally “slow walking” a promised review of the data on abortion pill harms, which Makary denies.