Dr. Christina Francis with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) thinks that "these drugs and the lies that women are being told is really the biggest issue facing the pro-life movement" today.
"Many times women are told that these abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol, that they're easy, they can take them in their own home, that it's just like having a period, but nothing can be further from the truth," she adds.
According to Francis, chemical abortions carry a four times-higher complication rate than surgical abortions.
Risks include heavy bleeding or hemorrhaging, severe infections that can require hospitalization or even cause women to die, and then incomplete abortions where the woman does not pass all of the baby or all of the placenta.
"That can lead to the need for emergency surgery or lead to bleeding and infection," says Francis. "So these drugs carry significant risks with them and many women are not aware of that."
In 2025, after the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published findings that one in 10 women taking abortion drugs experience severe adverse health events, AAPLOG wrote a letter to FDA and HHS to ask for a thorough safety review.
Side effects include sepsis, infection, and hemorrhaging, EPPC found.
Secretaries Marty Makary and Robert F Kennedy Jr. said it was being done, but there has been no review that has been published to date. In December, Bloomberg published an article saying that FDA was "slow walking" the study until after the mid-term elections.
AAPLOG has just recently written another letter to FDA and HHS demanding the review be done immediately.
Kelsey Pritchard, communications director for SBA Pro-Life America, was not surprised to hear of a delay.
"It's just a pattern from what we've seen from Commissioner Makary, unfortunately, from approving a new generic version of the abortion drug that will kill more unborn children to leaving a Biden rule in place that allows for the mail-order of abortion drugs into states that have pro-life laws," she told AFN in December.
