The notion of telemedicine or mail-order abortion — whereby abortion pills are dispensed to women in the mail without seeing a doctor — has long been described by pro-life advocates as dangerous, and rightly so. While there are legitimate dangers to undergoing a chemical abortion (with or without medical supervision), one new article specifically attacks the pro-life movement for raising warnings over another potential danger: women being forced into chemical abortions without their knowledge or consent.
Julianne McShane claimed to “debunk” this “lie” in an article for Mother Jones. “[T]he claim that medication abortion prescribed through telehealth contributes in any significant way to domestic abuse is baseless,” she wrote. “Experts told me it’s unsupported by evidence and ignores many of the ways reproductive coercion actually manifests — as well as the many benefits telehealth abortion can provide for people experiencing intimate partner violence.”
The expert McShane cited is Elisa Wells, co-director and co-founder of Plan C… a mail-order abortion pill business.
She also interviewed Diana Greene Foster, a pro-abortion researcher responsible for the thoroughly-debunked Turnaway Study. Another “expert” is Rebecca Gomperts, an abortionist and founder of Aid Access, another mail-order abortion pill business.
Needless to say, every single one of these supposed experts is significantly biased in favor of not only abortion being legal and available, but also of specifically mail-order/telemedicine abortion. So their “expert” responses are hardly surprising.
“There’s no basis in facts or medical science for any parts of this case,” Wells claimed, with Greene Foster adding that men forcing women into unwanted abortions is “extremely rare.” Gomperts said she hears from women who are being forced to keep the baby, but “never seen the other way around, where a women is forced to have an abortion against her will.”
It’s interesting they would make this claim, considering how many men — and women — have been arrested for this very thing.
Most recently, nurse-practitioner David Coots was arrested, along with his wife Melissa, after he inserted abortion pills into his pregnant mistress during sex. One woman, Ursula Wing, was arrested for illegally selling abortion pills, having been caught after one of her clients, Jeffrey Smith, bought the pills from her and slipped them into his girlfriend’s water bottle. Other men — Manishkumar Patel and Jin Mimae — have been arrested for the same reason. And these are only a few notable examples — there are many, many, many, many, many, many more.
READ: This New York man obtained the abortion pill. Guess what he did with it.
Yet we’re supposed to just accept that the idea of men forcing women to abort is a pro-life lie, simply because people with a vested financial interest in keeping telemedicine abortion legal and widely available say it’s a lie.
One man, Joe Baca, was able to order abortion pills from Plan C and Aid Access specifically, using a fake name each time. None of them verified his identity, got an ultrasound to verify the pregnancy (or rule out an extrauterine pregnancy), or even made sure to verify that he was an adult. Under the fake female names, he was easily able to get abortion pills mailed to him. “Neither company required proof of a doctor’s visit or even an ultrasound proving I was pregnant,” he said. “They did nothing to make sure I was not being abused, raped or trafficked. They did absolutely nothing to verify I was an adult beyond asking me how old I was. I simply told them I was born in 1995, but they never asked for an ID.”
None of this, nor the numerous real-life arrests and convictions, was acknowledged by McShane. But admitting that this is a real crime — that not only happens, but that no-test telemedicine abortions makes easier — would be bad for business. So of course, it gets shoved under the rug.
And if a few women are forced into unwanted abortions along the way, Wells and Gomperts will still get paid regardless.
