Three women who regret taking the abortion pill are urging Dr. Heidi Overton to renew the in-person dispensing requirement on mifepristone if she is confirmed as Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
“I believed it was safe, and I put my life on the line,” Elizabeth Gillette, 39, said on Friday in an interview with the Daily Signal. “And women deserve to know that this medication is a serious medication. This is not like Tylenol. This is not like something you should be getting over the counter.”
Gillette, Haile McAnally, and Jessica Williams sat down with the Daily Signal to share their experiences with the abortion pill and what actions they would like to see the government take to protect other women and their unborn babies.
Overton, who currently serves as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, had a Senate confirmation hearing for the FDA commissioner role on Thursday. If confirmed, she will take over the abortion pill safety review to determine if mifepristone should continue being mailed to women who order it online without seeing a doctor first.
After Gillette completed the abortion pill regimen at age 24, she was horrified to see an amniotic sack the size of a tennis ball holding a recognizable human baby.
“When we realize that’s what’s happening, that is what this pill is doing, people are gonna start realizing that maybe this isn’t what we should be doing in our bathrooms, in our hotel rooms, or at all,” she said.
Gillette suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and she expects it will continue for the rest of her life.
McAnally took abortion pills at 19. She said she was fooled by “the greatest marketing malpractice campaigns of our generation” into thinking getting an abortion wasn’t a big deal.
Because she was young and healthy, McAnally wasn’t worried about complications.
“Then as time went on, I realized that I was hemorrhaging in bathroom, and I almost died from these pills because of it,” she said. “And when I was in the clinic and they went over some of the consent forms, this was not something that they said.”
McAnally, now 33, wants women in similar situations to know they don’t have to go through with the abortion.
“I think sometimes there’s this pressure that it’s the easy way out, but there are so many resources like pregnancy help centers, the church,” she said. “I just encourage any young woman that may be put in this position … to look at the entire scope of the resources available to them.”
Williams, 39, immediately regretted taking the abortion pill and did an abortion pill reversal. She now has a healthy 4-year-old daughter.
Williams ordered abortion pills through a chatbot online, then crossed state lines to pick them up from the hotel where they were mailed. She said her husband pressured her to take the pills, and she would have benefitted from having to talk to another person who might have seen that she didn’t want to get an abortion.
“We need to have those safeguards there,” she said. “We need to have people making sure that a woman’s not being coerced or pressured into it, or that she’s in a safe situation making this decision for her choice. I think that’s really important to remember that. It’s really critical that we get these drugs out of the mail.”
Williams wants women to know that abortion pill reversal is an option for those who regret taking mifepristone.
“I have a beautiful, healthy, perfectly inside and out flawless baby girl; she’s now almost 4 because of it,” she said. “I think that women really need to have transparency and know that it’s an option. Even if we do still have this drug around, [women need] to know that they have the option for a reversal.”
