At the risk of stating the obvious, parenting in the digital age is scary. And in the interest of skipping the fluff, I’ll just get right to it – another threat parents of teens need to be wary of is mail-order abortion pills. 

Protect Your Teen By:

• Talk openly with your teens about this danger, learn how abortion pill trafficking operates, and make sure they know about pregnancy help centers so they can guide friends toward real help.

• Be alert to the coded language used to market abortion pills. Terms like “missed period pills,” “AB,” “needing an A,” “quilting,” or “camping” may be used as slang or code for abortion or abortion pills.

• Encourage teens to choose chastity, but also let them know you are there for them or their friends if a crisis pregnancy occurs.

• Educate about fetal development and the dignity of the unborn baby.

At Louisiana Right to Life, we have been sounding the alarm on the dangers of abortion pills for years, but it seems like every week we are hearing of another tragic situation caused by the extremely reckless availability of abortion-inducing drugs. Abortion pills were once only available in a doctor’s office and under a doctor’s care, but today, it is easier to get abortion pills online than it is to get baby formula at the grocery store (or any other common good only accessible with a key held by an absent store member).Growing evidence confirms what we have long known – these pills are dangerous and should be better regulated. 

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This is What You Need To Know :

1. Anyone, yes anyone, can get abortion pills online and have them in their mailbox within a few days. 

This includes minors, your daughter’s boyfriend, your daughter’s boyfriend’s parents, your son, traffickers, and, yes, your daughter. And in some cases, no payment is even necessary.

     2. Abortion pills are, as it turns out, dangerous.

This is something that the manufacturers, the FDA, and healthcare professionals have known for decades. Abortion pill use has drastically increased in the last 5 years, and now more people are starting to pay attention. But that doesn’t stop pill providers from insisting that abortion pills are “safer than Tylenol” or simply cause heavy period symptoms.

     3. Abortion pills are not the same as birth control.

Unlike birth control, abortion pills are not designed to prevent conception. Abortion pills are actually a combination of two drugs taken separately – mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone is taken first and is meant to cut off nutrients to essentially kill the fetus. The second drug, misoprostol, is used to induce delivery of the fetus. In fact, if you’ve ever been pregnant, you may have been given misoprostol for the very same purpose – inducing labor. 

     4. Abortion pills are not a “simple and safe solution”. 

Abortion pills cause an extremely painful, days-long process of heavy bleeding, massive cramping, and, of course, delivery of a fetus. Women who take abortion pills often go through this process in their homes with no idea what to expect and are then left to clean up the gruesome aftermath alone – including figuring out how to dispose of the fetus. Many women are left traumatized, and many will end up needing medical attention, which could include a surgical abortion. 

Imagine finding out your daughter had been pregnant and used abortion pills to “take care of it” only because you received a call from the hospital saying your daughter needed an emergency procedure. Or worse, that she was in critical condition because the pills didn’t work and she had developed sepsis. 

      5. Abortion pill packages come in all shapes and sizes. 

Imagine going to your mailbox and finding an unmarked envelope with a baggie of white pills inside. Maybe there are instructions, maybe there aren’t. If there are instructions, it is made very clear: If you have to go to the Emergency Room, do not tell them you took these pills. 

This is unfortunately what many young women experience in a moment of panic and fear after they’ve been promised a quick and easy solution. Aside from the astonishing suggestion that this is what healthcare looks like, it is extremely scary that anyone believes this is ok. We’re over here begging our kids not to pick up that dollar in the parking lot because it could be laced with fentanyl, but that baggie of pills in the mailbox…not suspicious at all. 

     6. Abortion pills are illegal in Louisiana for elective abortion. 

This is important to realize as we continue to hear stories of people ordering and giving abortion pills to a pregnant woman – whether they think they are helping or whether they have ulterior motives. 

In Louisiana, abortion pills are a Schedule IV controlled substance, which means possession of abortion pills without a valid prescription is a crime. And now, someone who provides abortion pills to a pregnant woman can be sued for at minimum $100,000 dollars. 

As a mom to both daughters and sons, what I am trying to say is that we parents must educate our older children about this. A young man who thinks he is doing the right thing by helping his girlfriend get abortion pills – or worse, forcing her to take them – can face serious life-altering consequences. And that young man’s parents may be liable as well. 

So What Do We Do?

Like many of the dangers threatening our younger and older children, there is not a magic bullet solution. We can use all the parental controls at our disposal, but as any parent knows, those are not “set it and forget it”. 

• Communication is an important starting point.
  • This does not mean you have to get into a whole debate with your teen about the morality or politics of abortion. But your child needs to know that prescription drugs that arrive magically in the mail without a doctor’s appointment are extremely dangerous no matter what they are.
  • Your teen deserves to know the truth about abortion pills. Tiktok isn’t going to tell them that they are likely to end up in the emergency room. The sellers aren’t going to tell them that they are going to see a tiny human and then have to figure out if they should flush it, bury it, throw it away, bring it to the hospital or what. The person who mails the pills and conveniently leaves off the return address isn’t going to tell them that they can face criminal charges and be sued for a lot of money if they give those pills to someone else. 
  • Your teen wants to know they can come to you for help instead of resorting to buying drugs from strangers on the internet. I can’t imagine anything more tragic than finding out my daughter felt it was better to turn to the internet for help with killing her unborn child than to come to me for support.
• Monitoring is an obvious necessity, but the target is constantly moving.
  • Watch for unknown account charges but keep in mind that some abortion pill providers will send pills for free. Many providers sell pills around $150. 
  • Watch for strange references in messages. If you’ve read a teen’s message anytime in the last five years or so, you know you quite literally have to be a codebreaker to decipher the meaning. Currently, references to “ab,” needing “an a,” quilting, or camping might be code for abortion or abortion pills. 

In a perfect world, our teens would not be threatened by the dangers of abortion pills because they would never be in such a situation for which abortion pills might be desired. And of course we should teach our teens about responsibility, the dignity of human life, and their own personal dignity. 

But there are sinister people and industries out there hoping that we won’t pay attention so they can continue to make a profit at the expense of our daughters, sons, and families. Talking to our older children about these threats and making sure they know where to turn for help in a tough situation is so vitally important.