Abortion coercion concerns surrounding mail-order pill mount with new reports

Readily available mail-order abortion pills have reportedly been used to trick women into ending the lives of their unborn children in multiple recent coercion cases, sparking concerns about forced abortions.

At least four alleged incidents of coerced abortions using the pill have already been reported across the country in 2025 alone, including cases in Texas, Illinois, and Louisiana.

An Illinois man was charged Aug. 23 and charged with two counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child for giving mifepristone to his seven-week pregnant girlfriend without her knowledge, according to local reports.

Police reportedly found his girlfriend crying in a bathroom and with a fetus in the toilet, 25News Now reported. The man said he obtained the Mifepristone from a “girl on campus” for $50 and claimed to believe his girlfriend knew he was giving her the pills.

Sarah Zagorski, senior director of public relations and communication at Americans United for Life, told the Daily Caller News Foundation her organization is “concerned about the growing number of forced abortions resulting from the FDA dangerously stripping commonsense safety measures from its approval of Mifepristone.”

“Anyone, including abusers and predators, can and have obtained these pills with nefarious intent,” she said. “States must pass laws similar to those in Louisiana, Texas, and West Virginia that protect women and girls and instate penalties for abortion pill traffickers.”

In Texas, reports indicate there have been at least three women forced into abortions unknowingly, along with one pressured into taking the pills, since 2024.

A Texas woman alleged in a lawsuit filed Aug. 11 that a man killed her unborn child by secretly dissolving abortion pills into her hot chocolate. Aid Access, a popular online abortion pill provider that sent pills to the man, is named as a defendant in the case.

The lawsuit alleges Aid Access and its founder, Dr. Rebecca Gompert, along with the man, are “guilty of felony murder.”

Jerry Rodriguez, a father whose two unborn children were killed using abortion pills, sued the California doctor who prescribed the drugs in July. While the mother initially wanted to give birth to the babies, her husband, who she had been separated from for years, ordered abortion pills from Dr. Remy Coeytaux online and pressured her to take them, according to the lawsuit.

A federal Bureau of Prisons employee was arrested in June in Texas for allegedly spiking his girlfriend’s drink with abortion drugs. A Texas attorney, Mason Herring, was sentenced in February 2024 to 180 days in jail after secretly giving abortion drugs to his pregnant wife, according to The New York Times.

“I believe this was a flagrant and profound injustice,” his wife, who believed the sentence was not enough, told the NYT.

Attorney General Ken Paxton sent cease-and-desist letters Aug. 20 to three entities shipping abortion drugs to Texas, including Aid Access and Coeytaux.

Paxton also sued in December 2024 a New York doctor who founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, for shipping pills to Texas. Citing the state’s recently enacted shield law, a New York county clerk refused in March to enforce the $100,000 judgment against Carpenter, prompting Paxton to sue the clerk in July.

A Louisiana grand jury indicted Carpenter on Jan. 31 for sending pills to a mother who gave the drugs to her minor daughter, even though the teen did not want an abortion.

“The allegations in this case have nothing to do with reproductive health care,” Republican Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told the NYT. “This is about coercion. This is about forcing somebody to have an abortion who didn’t want one.”

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has vowed not to turn Carpenter over to Louisiana.

“No state, no matter how pro-life, is currently safe from a flood of unregulated mail-order abortion drugs,” Katie Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “Blue-state ‘shield laws’ protect abortionists and activists who break the laws of other states – fueling domestic violence, putting women in the ER, taking the lives of their children against their will.”

Five online abortion providers supplied pills for “future use” without a doctor verifying key eligibility requirements during a DCNF investigation in June. At least one organization that supplied pills allegedly used to coerce a woman, Aid Access, also sent pills to the DCNF.

These kinds of cases have continued to arise across the country in recent years.

A nurse practitioner in Washington pleaded guilty in July after secretly giving abortion pills, which he had prescribed to himself, to his girlfriend, The News Tribune reported. His medical licenses were suspended in 2024 after he was charged.

In Massachusetts, a man who allegedly told his girlfriend abortion drugs were “iron pills or other vitamins” was charged in May 2024.

In Florida, a woman was charged in 2023 for trying to get the mother of her ex-boyfriend’s unborn child to take the abortion pill, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office.

A Wisconsin man was sentenced to five years in prison in April 2022 for “Attempted First Degree Homicide of an Unborn Child” after he placed crushed mifepristone in his girlfriend’s water bottle.

One California man held his girlfriend at gunpoint in 2019 to force her to take pills that ended her pregnancy, per local news reports. He was sentenced to a year in jail in 2022.

Some states have passed laws specifically targeting coercion. Republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee signed a law in April that makes tricking someone into taking an abortion-inducing drug a felony.

The pill has also been used to force women into abortions outside of the U.S.

In the U.K., a man was convicted in October 2024 for spiking a woman’s orange juice with the abortion pill, according to local authorities. Another man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in July 2025 for secretly giving a woman the pill.

Of more than 200 women who reported abortions in a 2023 survey by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, one in four women described their abortions as “unwanted or coerced.”

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