Sunday, October 4, 2026 · Independent editorial

The ectopic deaths were not the law

Janet Morana writes that a rise in ectopic-pregnancy deaths was not caused by laws that protect unborn children. ProPublica counted 200 such deaths from 2020 to 2025, against 100 in the six years before, and blamed abortion limits. Morana says the change that matters is mail-order abortion pills. Her Breitbart exclusive is the source. She calls one screening claim a lie. That is her word. The cases she lists are in the piece.

Morana writes that when then-President Joe Biden changed the rules about abortion drugs and allowed them to be ordered online and delivered by mail everyone in the pro-life movement expressed concern about mothers dying from undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies. She says that is what is happening according to ProPublica which found that 200 women died from 2020 to 2025 compared to 100 for the six years before that. Instead of blaming the spike on the increase in telehealth chemical abortion the report points to laws protecting babies from abortion as the culprit. As proof they offer stories from two women who were turned away from hospitals in Texas and Arkansas. Morana says they rely on a whole bunch of guesses and at least one outrageous lie. Here is the sentence she calls the lie. Telehealth clinics ask questions that filter out patients at higher risk of ectopic pregnancy and follow up with those they treat to screen for symptoms. That is according to Ushma Upadhyay who is identified as a researcher at the University of California San Francisco. Morana writes that studies on abortion performed there generally find abortion to be safe and absolutely the right thing to do under any circumstances so the claim is not surprising to her. She then sets down three cases so a reader can see how easy the pills are to get even if you are not pregnant and not a woman. A doctor in Toledo Hassan Abbas lost his medical license and will spend six months in a county lockup after ordering abortion pills online using his ex-wife’s driver’s license having the pills mailed to him and killing his unborn child by forcing the pills down his girlfriend’s throat. Emerson Evans of Normal Illinois has begun serving a seven-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter for giving his girlfriend one mifepristone pill in a smoothie and inserting three into her vagina and he said he bought the pills from a woman on a college campus for $50. Justin Anthony Banta was charged with attempted capital murder in Tarrant County Texas for allegedly ordering abortion pills online and slipping them to his girlfriend in her food and drink killing their child. Morana says these are just three of many more cases like this and it is hard to imagine any abortion-pill seller asked these men posing as women any questions. To learn about online ordering Dr. Christina Francis of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists went to the website of the overseas distributor Aid Access and posed as a 13-year-old girl taking blood thinners with an intrauterine device in place and a history of three prior cesarean sections and ectopic pregnancy. She received the pills in her mailbox in a state where abortion pills are banned. Morana says ProPublica’s ectopic report is supposition and guesswork and wishful thinking and she points back to the outlet’s 2024 investigation of two Georgia women who had taken abortion pills. The outlet insisted Georgia’s heartbeat law was responsible because if it had not been enacted the women would have had surgical abortions. Morana writes that in the real world at least one of them died because chemical abortion is unsafe and the other had many other drugs in her system at autopsy and that chemical abortion was the culprit not pro-life laws. ProPublica founded in 2007 describes itself as an independent nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Morana calls it a mouthpiece for the progressive causes dear to its funders. The piece says ProPublica received a $1 million grant from the Mariposa Foundation and that from 2020 to 2023 Mariposa also gave $800,000 in grants to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Claire Bernard is a member of ProPublica’s board of directors and the president of the Mariposa Foundation. In 2023 the Washington Examiner reported on left-leaning megadonors to ProPublica including George Soros whose Foundation to Promote Open Society has given $3 million to the outlet. Morana’s last word is plain. Women dying from abortion is an outrage. Women dying from ectopic pregnancy is tragic and needs to be more thoroughly studied and better understood. ProPublica does a disservice to all women by blaming these deaths on pro-life laws. She is executive director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.

Being a Christian in America this week is refusing to call the law that protects the baby the reason a woman died of an ectopic pregnancy and refusing to call a researcher’s filter the same thing as a pill that arrived anyway. Keep the mother and the child bigger than the blame. And do not confuse a grant-funded culprit with the faith that tells the truth about death.

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