This is a good example of an article full of half-truths and wrong interpretations of history in an effort to pretend that a rare behaviour is common, so as to try and punish everyone for it.
Earlier this year, 50 members of the UK Parliament, out of a total of 650, urged government ministers to ban “pills by post” and at-home abortions because one man bought the pills and put them in a woman’s drink to cause a miscarriage, which happened several hours later. To be fair, he was jailed for 12 years for assault, not exactly a good advertisement for following in his footsteps. Indeed, over many years now, there have been almost no other such stories published. It’s a very rare event.
Home use of abortion pills up to 12 weeks has been shown by WHO and by widespread use in many countries to be very safe, and policy allowing this in some countries was probably accepted more easily as it was proposed during the Covid pandemic. Not having to have one or more in-person consultations with a medical professional or have the abortion in a hospital or clinic did indeed help to prevent the spread of Covid. But in fact pharmacies as a primary source of pills and then pills sources moving online became very numerous very quickly and long ago reached countries almost all over the world. This started in Brazil in the mid-1980s when a woman used misoprostol purchased in a pharmacy without a prescription for stomach ulcers and noticed that the package insert warned “do not use if pregnant, can cause miscarriage”. By the late 1980s fewer women in Brazil were dying from unsafe abortions because they were using misoprostol pills at home. It has now become so common to obtain pills online and from pharmacies that no one actually knows how many abortions there are in the world any more.
SOURCE: The Telegraph, by Charles Hymas, 8 December 2024. Editorial comment by Marge Berer.