Our Increasingly Dangerous Abortion-Pill Reality
By: Kathryn Jean Lopez, originally published October 17, 2025, The National Review
“We have reason for hope. Look at you. Look at you. There is our hope. Look at the wonder of you.” — the late New York Cardinal John O’Connor, founder of the Sisters of Life.
I plugged that quote into Google, and AI told me it was from Elvis Presley. I suppose I can roll with the disinformation. The more it is attributed to Elvis, perhaps the more likely people will be to consider its truth?
One of the things we talked about at the Leading with Love Conference at the Catholic University of America last week was the reality that if you do not know that your life is worth living — and celebrating — it’s going to be next to impossible to welcome new life into the world with enthusiasm and the kind of radical hospitality and self-sacrifice it requires.
Celebrate birthdays. Let yours be celebrated, too. These are important. You are important. That’s how we love, by being loved.
The ‘Vital Interest’ of the World Is ‘the Life of the Child’
You may remember the famous debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin. Do you recall, though, James Baldwin on abortion?
There’s a new biography out on Baldwin, and at Angelus magazine, columnist Monsignor Richard Antall writes:
“The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all they have,” Baldwin writes.
[Baldwin] continues: “This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched.”
Speaking of the “civilized” promoters of the destruction of life in the womb — before governments like our own began pushing an abortion agenda on the developing world — Baldwin says, “these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life. . . . There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
“Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.”
Privatizing Abortion
Do we actually care about chemical abortions?
In October 2025, this is a question we all need to ask ourselves.
Because we are simply privatizing abortion in America. We’re relegating it to something that happens in the bathroom. Something that is none of anyone’s business.
Is that what we want to be doing? Is that what we ought to be doing? I know the answer to the second question is no. I fear that the answer to the first may be a resigned yes for many more than might care to admit it.
As the Queen Debbie Downer who brings up abortion all too often, I know too well how much people don’t want to think about abortion. I get it. I don’t actually want to. But now is the time when we are living. And abortion is easy to access — and increasingly so. The pressure is high, and so are the expectations that abortion be considered just another health care choice. And how many of us are suffering in some way from the repercussions of abortion? In our families? In our own bodies? More than a half century of abortion in America has left walking wounded — real human lives ended, others forever changed. And with the added culture that insists you pretend that your root canal was more dramatic than your abortion.
In this brief video, a young woman talks about her coerced abortion. Hers is a live Alliance Defending Freedom case against the FDA. Rosalie’s boyfriend got the abortion pills in Louisiana from California. “If mail-order abortion wasn’t a thing,” she says “I’m 100 percent sure I would have my child.”
The FDA should have never approved the abortion-pill cocktail in the first place. It should not have allowed the Biden administration to remove the in-person mandate for prescribing the pills. And now, the FDA should not have approved a generic version of mifepristone, the key component in chemical abortions.
There were a few pieces this week on chemical abortion, some occasioned by the recent generic approval.
Carmel Richardson writes at First Things:
As the abortion pill becomes more common, it will more commonly be the source of lawsuits and horror stories, as that 11 percent of women who experience deadly side effects represents a more sizable number of victims. All of modern medicine has side effects, and medical malpractice insurance exists for a reason. Yet unlike the woman whose baby is aborted in a clinic, the woman who takes mifepristone at home has no doctor, no nurse, and no technician to blame if something goes wrong, much less if everything goes horribly right. Mifepristone lays the burden of responsibility squarely on her shoulders, as the sole agent of her child’s death. Maybe something went wrong, maybe she was mistaken about the nature of the drug, maybe she regrets her decision, it matters not: By putting more killing in the hands of mothers with practically no oversight, the FDA is giving women the unfettered freedom of choice abortion advocates have been begging for for generations. It is a responsibility they almost certainly are not prepared to meet.
Marjorie Dannenfelser in USA Today:
Evita Solutions, which describes its mission as being to “destigmatize abortion” and make abortions accessible “for all,” submitted its application to produce generic mifepristone in October 2021 — mere months after then-President Joe Biden’s FDA used COVID-19 as an excuse to ditch the safeguard of in-person doctor visits to obtain abortion drugs.
No doubt a profitable opportunity was in sight. Today, there are at least 1.1 million abortions a year in America, and more than 60% are carried out using drugs.
Taking doctors out of the equation, the abortion industry will happily sell dangerous drugs to anyone over the internet, completely free of face-to-face interaction with a clinician. Lack of access is clearly not a problem. . . . The stakes and urgency are greater than ever now.
John Gerardi on NRO: FDA’s Approval of Mifepristone Generic Raises Troubling Questions
Virginia Is for . . . Killers?
I hate to be harsh, but Virginia is out of control. As I write, that Jay Jones character is still running for attorney general there, despite his horrendous text-message outbursts and other conversations wishing violence against Republicans and, in one case, the children of a politician. Meanwhile, as you may have seen, Abigail Spanberger, the party’s gubernatorial candidate, won’t take back her endorsement of him and has also made clear that not only does she support legal assisted suicide in the state, she also is opposed to anyone opting out (doctors, Catholic hospitals) for conscience reasons (read: basic religious freedom). So no life. No (religious) liberty. Want to throw in no pursuit of happiness, too? Of course, if you don’t have life or liberty, I suppose we’ve covered that too now, haven’t we?
So much for love.
The Godfather Knew Evil
Diane Keaton has died — God rest her soul — and, of course, one of her classic roles was in The Godfather. It was in the sequel where (spoiler alert) she told Michael Corleone that it wasn’t a miscarriage that ended her pregnancy, but an abortion. It was a boy. She wanted to end the evil of the Mafia family lineage. She did something “evil,” “unholy.” She “killed.” Would such words make it to the final cut of a major motion picture today?
Rachel Weeps
It’s not a major-motion picture, but maybe the 2025 equivalent compared with Godfather days — there’s a new season of the Apple TV series The Morning Show. It’s been an ode to abortion in the past, especially around the Dobbs decision. But this isn’t a comment on any of the (crazy/amoral) plotlines. While doing publicity for the new season, former Friends star Jennifer Aniston was asked why she has never adopted children. The tabloid press has long made her relationships and fertility struggles everyone’s business. She said that she tried many things — including IVF — but was “selfish” in never opting for adoption. She wanted the biological connection to her child.
First, I know she is a celebrity and that such interviews go with the territory, but she’s also a woman and this is among the most intimate questions you can demand and answer to. Also: Adoption should not be second-best. It should not be a fallback plan. It’s not mandatory if you are having fertility obstacles. Adoption is a calling. It’s a calling that more need to consider — especially for as long as there are children in foster care in the United States. But it should never be that thing you are stuck doing because your body isn’t cooperating with the creation of new life.
And About Donald Trump and IVF
Infertility is an agony. IVF is not the solution.
The White House announcement Thursday could have been worse. It could have had mandates. It could have had subsidies.
Still, in vitro fertilization creates life and destroys it, too. Also suspends it on ice. The full implications of all of this — moral, medical, financial — aren’t necessarily explained to a couple desperate for a child to love.
Gratitude should be whispered to God for those who worked behind the scenes to make this less problematic than it could have been. But the president made clear he doesn’t understand pro-life objections. Or scientific ones, for that matter. This was an unnecessary move that makes more of a moral mess of life and in a vast majority of cases overhypes the hope that IVF represents to those struggling with infertility. (Just ask Jennifer Aniston, who has a few dollars to spare for some decent health and fertility care.)
Some further insta-thoughts and links elsewhere on NRO.
Other Things
You, like me, might remember the opening of the Houston Planned Parenthood mega-center almost 20 years ago. Shawn Carney from 40 Days for Life posted a new photo of the building, now closed, with the Planned Parenthood sign officially removed. I’ve said before and I will say millions of times again, I suspect, that the end of so many Planned Parenthood clinics is a sign of the times – the clinics aren’t as needed as they once were. Your local pharmacy is an abortion clinic now. Still, it’s remarkable to see!
A headline from Michigan: “After Planned Parenthood closure, doctors pioneer new abortion access model in Upper Peninsula”
What’s the new model? Pills at urgent care.
Feels like the same as it ever was.
In Victoria, Australia, Catholic bishops are warning against the further liberalization of assisted suicide, including the erosion of the conscience protections.
In Minnesota, children in foster care have the right to see their siblings. But they don’t know that. Keeping siblings together is just about the best thing, in addition to permanency, this needs to be known and accomplished.
HerPlan has some practical ways to “Help Moms and Babies” during the government shutdown — and they actually could and should become things we simply do: like helping struggling families by making donations to pregnancy centers and food pantries that are resources for them.
From the National Council on Adoption: “Beyond the Immediate Family: Engaging Family and Friends in the Adoption Journey”
Upcoming
Are you a birth mom? Brave Love would like to celebrate you on November 13. Check out if they will be in your city here.
Applications are open for the GIVEN Catholic Young Women’s Leadership Program this June. I just spoke at one of their gatherings and have been an encourager of the initiative — involved as a speaker, mentor, spiritual director, and maybe other things over the years. If you are or know a young Catholic woman 21 to 35, send her the link.
I’ll be in Grand Rapids, New York City, D.C., West Palm Beach, Mexico City, Dallas, New Haven, Steubenville, and wherever I am forgetting in the coming weeks. Some talking about WFB at 100, others talking about antisemitism and Nostra Aetae, the pope’s Augustinian motto, gratitude as a civic virtue. If your school or group wants in on the K-Lo calendar — especially on the future of the pro-life movement, the civil rights issue of our time — email klopez@nationalreview.com.
And can I ask for prayers for Jennifer and Joe Fulwiler? First of all, we’ve been a part of one another’s lives for years, thanks to the house that WFB built.
You may know Jen’s name because she’s an author, she has been a radio-show host, and she’s a stand-up comedian. She got into the comedy thing seriously after Kate Spade died of suicide. She wears a Kate Spade bracelet and wanted to find a way to reach women like Spade, who are secular and as in need of hope as anyone — people she didn’t think she was reaching necessarily on her Catholic Channel show on Sirius (though anything is possible, I say, as one who has a weekday feature there and pray that God works with everything). Jen and Joe are loving parents whose world has been rocked by the diagnosis of their daughter, Lane, with a cancerous brain tumor. Please pray for Lane, her five siblings, and Jen and Joe.
Send messages of encouragement to Lane and the family at katlyn@thejfshow.com. And a friend set up a GoFundMe for donations for the Fulwilers here.
More next week. See you in New York or Grand Rapids, or somewhere, before then.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review.