Why the abortion pill will end the pro-life debate as we know it

I wouldn’t call my dad a visionary. He couldn’t predict the weather. He never played the ponies.

But I remember him telling me in the early 1980s that the whole debate over abortion was going to end one day with a pill.

I don’t think he had a special line to the future. He was probably reflecting discussions he had with his doctor colleagues at St. Joseph’s Hospital in downtown Phoenix or some think piece he read in TIME Magazine.

But the future was clear to him.

One day technology would make abortion so simple and safe and private that there would be no room for politics.

Pandemic spurred an abortion revolution

That day my father predicted is arriving quietly, almost imperceptibly, as the political salvos still explode overhead.

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and moved the abortion debate to the states, the abortion pill is quietly asserting itself as the decisive factor in one of America’s longest running political disputes.

First synthesized in the early 1980s by French pharmaceutical Roussel-Uclaf and called RU-486 or mifepristone, the abortion pill won approval for wider use by the French government in 1988.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would eventually approve mifepristone for up to 70 days or 10 weeks of pregnancy in the year 2000. Combined with misoprostol, the two-drug approach became known as medication abortion, the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute reports.

Use of the “abortion pill” rose steadily in the United States, but not until the COVID-19 pandemic would it really begin to take off.

As much of the country languished in lockdown, the FDA relaxed the health-care rules so patients could use telemedicine to get prescriptions that once required an in-person visit to the doctor.

The pill is now the No. 1 method of abortion

That allowed women to obtain the abortion pill by telemedicine.

“Patients were able to have a clinical consultation by phone, text, video or online platform, and then have abortion pills mailed to their home by the provider or a certified online pharmacy,” Guttmacher recounted.

In that time, the abortion pill became the most common form of abortion in the United States, with 54% of them attributed to medication. Last year that number shot up to 63%, Guttmacher reported.

And you can expect it to grow as we approach a future when the vast majority of those who abort their children will do it themselves with a pill.

The abortion pill has won wide acceptance with the American public. More than 70% of Americans support access to medication abortion, including 51% of Republicans, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll conducted in March.

More and more studies emerge that the abortion pill is not only safe, but highly effective at ending pregnancy — with success 95% of the time, according to Guttmacher.

Some pro-life activists argue that the medical community is not fully reporting complications with the abortion pill. Those concerns should be taken seriously and let evidence determine the outcome.

In oral arguments last week, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court signaled it is likely to keep mifepristone widely available to the American public.

Abortion is nothing to celebrate

Reading this column, you might get the idea that I’m celebrating this change. I’m not. I don’t think it’s healthy for a nation to abort roughly 1 million of its offspring in a single year.

Nor do I think it is something to celebrate that the births of African Americans and Latinos are stopped at rates far higher than the white population.

Have you seen the numbers on this? They’re pretty staggering and should give all people pause.

Here’s the abortion rates by racial/ethnic cohorts in 2021 in states in where they could be measured by Pew Research:

• White women – 6.4 abortions per 1,000 white women.

• Hispanic women – 12.3 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women.

• Non-Hispanic Black women – 28.6 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic Black women.

That’s a social-justice disparity with undeniably real consequences that nobody talks about.

Democrats don't see this as a tragedy

More data that should give us pause is the carefree attitude about abortion.

Eleven percent of the women who had abortions in 2021 were having their third abortion, according to Pew. Eight percent were having their fourth or more.

This is what happens with no-regrets, no-consequences abortion, as the Democratic Party moves from a philosophy of abortion should be “legal, safe and rare” to “every abortion that can happen will happen.” The Democratic Party is removing all stigma around abortion.

And I can hear every Democrat cheer that thought.

But they should take pause. Because we all should be conflicted about abortion.

None of us see the consequences of abortion because the lives extinguished simply disappear. But if we could see the counter-factual of those 1 million souls lost each year, if we could see the faces of the people denied life and see who they might have become, we would see tragedy.

But I'm mostly writing to Republicans

Republicans and conservatives should be conflicted about abortion, because they should never feel at ease using the long arm of the law to try to stop the decisions of women and families who believe differently.

They’re the real reason I write this column.

Conservatives need to know that the landscape is not only changing politically and not in our favor, but is changing practically, as women decide more and more to manage their own abortions.

GOP leader says: Birth control is why women are so 'bitter'

They need to understand that pressing their cause in the courts and the ballot box is likely futile.

Americans overwhelmingly support legal abortion, and even the states that have not yet figured that out will do so once all the pro-life politicians are voted out of office.

Find new ways to discourage abortion

No, those of us who are disturbed by the astronomical numbers of abortion are going to have to find new ways to discourage it.

And our secret weapon is not a weapon at all. It’s children. We need to promote a life culture that recognizes that children brighten lives and larger society — that they are the beating pulse of any culture and its promise of a future.

Any responsible person who has had children understands how parenthood changes you, changes your priorities and multiplies your happiness.

We’re in a world in which too many young people are sold the opposite. A bleak future. Much of their music and literature and movies reflect a dystopian vision. They are taught that children are burden on adults and society and the environment.

They need to learn about another future in which children illuminate lives and make people around them better and more optimistic, make adults more concerned about improving their communities — because they now have a stake in it.

Nothing focuses the mind so completely on the future as your own children. They are the people you most love and the people who will live their lives there.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Abortion pills will end the political fight over abortion. What next?