As Covid-19 keeps many people home, expect to see a greater push to get access to the abortion pill online. Currently, thirteen states allow the abortion pill to be sent by mail after the woman attends a video conference. No in-person visit to a doctor or clinic is required in these states who are participating in a current study . In other states, the manner of accessing the abortion pills may be a bit different, but the commonality between them and others is that access to abortion via telehealth is getting easier and easier. 

Attorney general Xavier Becerra from California is leading a coalition of lawyers pushing to make abortion via telemedicine mainstream. They collaborated in sending a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services calling on them to make the abortion pills easily accessible during the coronavirus pandemic. Planned Parenthood is also making attempts to expand telemedicine throughout all fifty states. 

If the abortion pill preserves a woman’s health and well being as abortion advocates claim, then women should be able to access it with no problem. Restricting access to abortion during Covid-19 is wrong. Abortion should be considered an essential medical service. Women should not have to drive hundreds of miles to find a clinic that will give them the abortion pill. Restricting women’s access to abortion is an obstruction of their rights.  I agree with all of these statements.  If.  If the unborn is not a human being like you and me. 

Talk of restricting abortion access would be ridiculous if we were talking about simply removing tissue or cells, components or parts of a greater whole. If abortion is killing a whole, distinct, and living human being, however, it makes perfect sense to restrict it.

The term healthcare access in this conversation attempts to cover for the reality that the abortion pill protocol kills unborn human beings. It may be a less direct form of killing, but it’s killing nonetheless. Consider if one person killed someone by poisoning and then another person killed someone by stabbing, the stabbing to death is a more direct form of killing than the poisoning; but both methods amount to the same result– the intentional killing of another human being. 

The abortion pill is a two-step process. The first pill taken is an oral dose of Mifepristone, which cuts off the hormone progesterone in the woman’s body, thus starving the human embryo of nutrients. This causes the embryo to detach from the uterine wall. The second pill, Misoprostol, is taken to induce contractions, and the tiny embryo is expelled from the woman’s body. In other words, this causes an induced abortion, and women usually end up expelling their preborn child’s bloody body into the toilet.

Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates erroneously claim this is a safe way to “end a pregnancy.” Safe for whom? Killing another human being in their most vulnerable and weakest state is not safe for them. In fact, it disrespects their bodily autonomy and kills them in an environment where they are meant to be safe and protected. Abortion advocates assume the unborn’s humanity is not even up for discussion and talk about early abortions as though they are nothing more then emptying the uterus. 

Abortion by definition is the intentional destruction of unborn human life; or killing. That fact is not disputed by anyone who is knowledgeable and honest about the nature of abortion. Many advocates of the pro-choice position openly acknowledge this. Faye Wattleton, former Planned Parenthood president said “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” Ann Furedi, chief executive of the largest independent abortion business in the UK, said “We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life.”

Because the method of killing is so different with the abortion pill, it can be harder for some people to visualize how this intentionally destroys the life of another human being like you and me. It is true the development of the human is primitive at this stage of life, but using vague phrases to make it seem like medically induced abortion is not killing is inaccurate and misleading. Even if what is expelled from the women’s body oftentimes appears to be an undifferentiated bloody mass, it is important to understand that developmentally speaking the subtle differentiations of an early human life can be more difficult to see in this situation. This so-called “bloody mass” is what a dead embryonic human looks like in this condition of having been violently and prematurely expelled. Just because the body may not appear as human as you and me, this should offer us little comfort when considering the destruction of another human being. 

The humanity of the unborn is often completely ignored in pro-choice arguments. The abortion pill’s purpose is to kill an unborn child and yet this reality is couched in language that makes it appear as if this is just a simple matter of women being able to access the care they need. It is dishonest, misleading, and inaccurate when pro-choice advocates use euphemisms like “women’s health” and “reproductive freedom” to argue their point. Pro-life people are not against women’s health. What we are against is killing innocent human beings. Abortion does precisely that by whatever method is used. Instead of pushing for abortion access, why not empower women to embrace the ability they have to carry the next generation? Killing weaker, vulnerable human beings is never empowering.