According to NPR, during the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supply lines into the nation were shut down. But as the citizens of Ukraine were struggling to survive and in desperate need of food, running water, and shelter, abortion advocates decided to advance the culture of death in the war-torn country.
Galina Maistruk, whose organization in Ukraine partners with International Planned Parenthood Federation, is an OB/GYN who said that seven weeks after supply chains to the country fell, there were no abortion pills left.
Another doctor, named Olga, claimed that up to five times as many women were asking for abortion pills after the invasion. “We realized that women would come and come and come, and there are going to be more and more of them. But the pills, there’s not going to be more of them. And we didn’t know if there was going to be any,” said Olga.
Smuggling abortion pills into a war-torn land
With no planes allowed to enter Ukraine, abortion pill suppliers, who had tens of thousands of abortion pills ready to be delivered to the nation by donation, were left to travel by land with the pills. This meant getting to Ukraine through Poland — a very pro-life nation that prohibits the use of the abortion pill.
An unidentified abortion pill supplier told NPR that he “didn’t want Polish customs to find any mifepristone.” He explained, “If these pills are labeled misoprostol and mifepristone, it’s a big problem.”
Mifepristone is the first drug of the abortion pill regime. It blocks the naturally occurring pregnancy hormone progesterone, thereby depriving the baby of nutrients necessary for his or her survival. The second pill is misoprostol, which causes contractions that expel the baby’s body.
“So the supplier’s solution was to take the medicine out of its packaging, out of its labels, and pour it in bulk into plastic bags,” said Rough Translation podcast host Gregory Warner. “Imagine a bunch of plastic bags with 75,000 loose pills inside. And actually, you need multiple pills for an abortion. So that’s enough for about 15,000 abortions. The supplier then flew those bags to Poland, where they were handed off to a chain of volunteers. And one of those volunteers on the chain was a Ukrainian woman named Yevgenia. She has an NGO that delivers medical supplies.”
According to Warner, Yevgenia was taking a risk and compromising her charity work by accepting the pills. She told NPR she didn’t want to touch them, but that because she knew a lot of women were requesting the pills due to rape carried out by Russian military members, she felt she had to. She managed to make it across the border into Ukraine without the border guards checking the bags.
According to reporter Katz Laszlo, there is more than enough supply of the abortion pill in Ukraine now. There are stacks “taller than us,” she said. Yevgenia explained that some of the pills may even expire before anyone uses them.
Abortion pill use can be traumatic
Christina said that taking the abortion pill “felt like HELL!” and “was worse than labor with my son.” She also noted, “Within two hours of taking the second set of pills I had the baby in the toilet. When I turned around there it was in the sack and everything. I broke open the sack and held the helpless little baby in my hand. I cried and felt like I had just murdered someone so innocent.”
Christina has nightmares over the abortion.
Elizabeth recalled “so much pain and blood I thought I might die” when she took the abortion pill. “When I picked [the sac] up, I could see the baby inside. He looked like a little gummy bear. I sat and held him and cried.”
Following her decision to abort, Elizabeth suffered from anorexia, abusive relationships, and post-traumatic stress disorder, which a counselor linked directly to the abortion.
Their heartbreaking stories and many others can be read here. None of the women who received the abortion pill in Ukraine agreed to speak with NPR.
Though Yevgenia believed she was mostly helping women who had survived rape, Olga said that she didn’t personally attend to any cases in which the women who wanted the abortion pills had been raped. She also said she purposefully didn’t ask them — denying potential rape survivors any opportunity to receive actual support and healing.
Abortion does not heal the trauma of rape, and those who give the abortion pill to women as an attempted solution for rape are neglecting trauma these women have endured. Women in Ukraine are facing multiple traumatic situations — war, loss of life, loss of home, and possibly sexual assault. The abortion pill puts these women at risk of further trauma.
