You can order abortion pills by mail. That reality should be enough to give us all pause, whatever one's moral position on abortion.
You can be in Texas, where abortion is technically illegal, and get your lethal cocktail from a doctor in New York. Louisiana? No problem. California will provide. There should be a way to stop this, but there doesn't seem to be a will.
Polling has told us for decades that people don't want women in crisis pregnancies to be without options. This is a good thing, because it challenges us in the best of ways: Women deserve better than abortion.
Their children deserve better, too, though they don't have a voice in the matter. They deserve a chance at life. What if an unexpected pregnancy were considered a blessing instead? Is there ever really a right time? A child will always naturally come up with scores of ways to be inconvenient once allowed to live beyond the womb. Don't kid yourself — "Planned Parenthood" is a mirage in more ways than one.
"If mail-order abortion wasn't a thing, I'm pretty sure I would have my child," Rosalie Markezich testifies. Her boyfriend initially was willing to have the baby they had conceived. But he changed his mind. She was insistent about not having an abortion. So he used her information and ordered abortion pills. Driving one day, they got into an argument over them and the baby. He pulled over in a hospital parking lot, of all things, and forced her to take the pills. Their nearest potential stop was his house, where she bolted for the bathroom, trying to vomit. Instead, she saw blood on the other end. "And so I just lay there bleeding, crying." She's tried to fight back with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, going to court to try to spare other young women the abuse she suffered.
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"As a pro-lifer, I think it is absolutely crazy that you can order a pill directly to your door that kills your child," Abby Johnson, who once ran a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, recently wrote on social media. "Abortion pills are evil, and this shouldn't exist in a civilized country." To use the word "evil" requires a moral compass. But to acknowledge that there is a human death involved in abortion simply involves science.
There are pluses and minuses to our so-called "therapeutic culture," but we simply are not being serious people if we pretend that leaving a mother alone in a bathroom to dispose of the remains of her child is healthy.
At the very least, whatever happened to "safe, legal, and rare"? Abortion in America is anything but the latter and doesn't come in on the safe too securely. And as for legal: Does it really matter? Too many politicians just want it off their plates if it can't be politically beneficial. Some may pretend it's empowering, but it's the opposite: It's deadly to babies and to our souls.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.
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