U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into the abortion group Plan C.
According to Hawley’s complaint, Plan C teaches Americans how to obtain chemical abortion drugs in violation of state law and advises users to conceal their activity through privacy-focused browsers, virtual private networks, and encrypted email.
Lawmakers are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
The complaint raises a larger question: How much risk is the abortion industry willing to impose on women and girls in pursuit of unrestricted access?
Recent cases have shown how easily men can obtain mifepristone online and use it to coerce or drug women. Yet the industry continues pressing to remove safeguards, minimize medical supervision, and treat mail-order abortion as ordinary consumer health care.
Congress, meanwhile, recently allowed taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to resume, despite sustained public opposition to federal support for the abortion provider.
That decision is especially troubling after the New York Times reported last year that Planned Parenthood was “in crisis.” The story described understaffed clinics, poor conditions, inadequate care, and botched procedures. Planned Parenthood has offered little public evidence that those problems have been corrected.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Again and again, the abortion industry’s demand for fewer restrictions comes at the expense of basic standards of safety, medical care, and accountability.
Republican lawmakers should follow Hawley’s lead. Organizations that facilitate illegal access to abortion drugs or help users evade state safeguards should face scrutiny. Congress and the administration should also restore protections abandoned in recent years.
Chemical abortion offers the clearest example of what deregulation has produced.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration removed the long-standing in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone. Women and girls may now obtain the drug through online providers without first seeing a doctor.
That convenience carries serious risks.
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Mifepristone can produce dangerous complications when used later in pregnancy or by women with certain medical conditions. It cannot treat an ectopic pregnancy, which may become life-threatening without prompt diagnosis. An online questionnaire cannot perform an ultrasound, conduct a physical examination, or reliably detect coercion.
Many online providers do not require proof that a patient has received an ultrasound or an in-person medical evaluation.
My colleague Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, recently tested one such system. She told an online abortion provider that she was 13 years old and had a history of ectopic pregnancies, cesarean sections, an intrauterine device, and other serious complications.
Any one of those disclosures should have prompted further screening. Her stated age alone should have raised immediate concerns about abuse, consent, and parental involvement.
Instead, the provider accepted her payment and mailed the drugs.
Women and girls have a right to understand what can go wrong before they are left to experience the consequences alone.
The mail-order system has also enabled horrifying acts of coercion and abuse.
An Army captain was convicted after impregnating a subordinate and giving her mifepristone without her consent. A Texas attorney repeatedly slipped abortion drugs into his wife’s drinks. In Louisiana, a young man used his girlfriend’s information to order mifepristone and then isolated and pressured her into taking it. An Ohio doctor forced the drug down his girlfriend’s throat.
Those are just the cases that became public. How many other women have suffered in silence? How many have lost pregnancies without knowing that a partner drugged them? How many were pressured into abortions while isolated from family, doctors, or anyone positioned to recognize the abuse?
Mail-order abortion removes the very people most likely to detect coercion: physicians, nurses, clinic staff, parents, and trusted family members.
It also leaves women to manage bleeding, pain, fear, and possible medical emergencies without direct supervision.
Research cited by pro-life advocates indicates that many women report feeling pressured into abortions they did not want or that conflicted with their values. Whatever the precise scale, coercion is a real and documented danger. Policies should make it easier to detect, not easier to conceal.
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Yet prioritizing access over safety increasingly appears to be a feature rather than a bug of the abortion industry’s model.
Plan C says it seeks to “transform access to abortion in the U.S. by normalizing the self-directed option of abortion pills by mail.” That mission statement emphasizes access and normalization. It says nothing about medical screening, coercion, abuse, or the risks of taking the drugs without an examination.
A website that teaches users to order abortion drugs secretly and evade state laws does not merely serve women seeking abortions. It may also serve abusers looking for a discreet way to obtain drugs they can use against women.
The beneficiaries are obvious: organizations that sell or distribute the pills and men willing to use them as instruments of coercion.
Lawmakers have tolerated this system for too long. They have permitted the weakening of medical safeguards, restored funding to Planned Parenthood, and resisted efforts to require in-person care for chemical abortion.
They are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
Hawley and a growing coalition of pro-life groups are right to demand accountability.
Congress and the Justice Department should investigate organizations that knowingly help users violate state law. Federal regulators should restore meaningful medical safeguards for mifepristone. Lawmakers should also ensure that minors, abuse victims, and women with dangerous medical conditions are not abandoned to an online form and a package in the mail.
Women and girls deserve better than an abortion system built around secrecy, isolation, and plausible deniability.
"It's insanity," James Lyons told Blaze News about the latest abortion bill making its way through the Massachusetts legislature. Lyons, a former state representative and past chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, added, "And it has to stop."
A long-standing line, one that most radical abortion legislation rarely crosses, is viability outside the womb. The rate of survival for a baby born during the 23rd week of pregnancy is 23%-27%, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. At 24 weeks the survival rate jumps dramatically to 42%-59%.
'The legislation promises that an already ominous shadow will grow even darker over the state.'
Democrats in the Massachusetts House overwhelmingly passed a bill in a 199-33 vote on Wednesday that would greatly expand abortion access past 24 weeks, effectively making it open season on viable human beings.
Advocates for the unborn have emphasized the extreme nature of this legislation and called for the state Senate to kill it outright.
Massachusetts law currently prohibits abortion past 24 weeks unless executed by a doctor who has determined it is necessary to preserve the life of the mother; necessary to preserve the mother's physical or mental health; warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis; or warranted "because of a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions."
The bill recently passed by the House, H. 5595, would scrap these requirements for late-term abortions, enabling an abortion to be committed against a preborn baby past 24 weeks solely "based upon the professional judgment of the physician."
H. 5595 would also change state law to bar any medical review process from overriding the decision by a doctor and patient to execute a late-term abortion, and would eliminate the requirement that except in an emergency situation, late-term abortions must be performed "in a hospital duly authorized to provide facilities for obstetrical services."
Lyons further told Blaze News, "It is absolutely unconscionable what these people are doing in Massachusetts."
He then noted that this is the latest in a sequence of radical pro-abortion maneuvers, including:
"The reason that they're getting away with it is because the Massachusetts legislature is dominated by radical leftists, and they unfortunately have done everything they can possibly do to silence any opposition," said Lyons, who changed parties from Democrat to Republican in 1983 in part because of President Ronald Reagan but also because "there was no question about it that the Democratic Party was being taken over ... by the radical left."
Democratic state Rep. Christine Barber, a radical leftist with endorsements by Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Equity Now, told the Boston Globe that the late-term abortion bill is aimed at sparing residents from the inconvenience of having to travel out of state to kill their preborn children.
"Patients have to leave to other states, leave their support network, and pay out of pocket," Barber said. "You should be able to get care that your doctors are recommending here in Massachusetts."
'The fight is not over.'
Barber cited as an example the trip that one resident, Kate Dineen, made to Maryland in 2022 to kill her 33-week-old baby. The boy suffered a stroke in utero and was reportedly given a 50% chance of dying before delivery. Dineen had a Maryland abortionist administer a lethal injection to the boy, whose remains she later delivered in Boston.
Reproductive Equity Now, an organization that has also used the out-of-state execution of Dineen's baby to promote this legislation, celebrated the passage of H. 5595.
Claire Teylouni, interim co-executive director of the pro-abortion group, stated, "We are thrilled to see the Massachusetts House of Representatives take this crucial step to expand abortion access across the Commonwealth."
Advocates for the unborn alternatively condemned Democrats' campaign against the preborn.
Fr. Daniel Pacholec, direct of the Respect Life Office for the Catholic Diocese of Springfield, noted, "Massachusetts already has one of the most progressive abortion laws in the country, and this goes even further. This should make everyone squeamish. This is not a partisan issue. This is about human decency."
Massachusetts Citizens for Life noted that "the bill passed despite the concerns of thousands of Massachusetts residents who contacted legislators and shared their opposition, and despite the fact that it would allow unborn children who are capable of feeling pain and surviving outside the womb to be killed."
"Women experiencing unimaginable, heart-wrenching pregnancy complications absolutely deserve all the support they need, but that support is not what this bill provides," said Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of MCFL, in a statement shared by the diocese. "Instead, this bill ensures increased abortion industry profits and taxpayer-funded late-term procedures. The legislation promises that an already ominous shadow will grow even darker over the state of Massachusetts."
The MCFL has stressed that "the fight is not over" and urged Bay Staters to urge their state senators to oppose the version before them now, S.1563.
The Massachusetts Family Institute has also condemned the bill, noting that it would "end virtually all abortion restrictions in Massachusetts, allowing abortion at full term with no medical justification or second opinion required — for any reason, or none at all."
When asked whether the goal of this and related legislation is to make the Bay State a national abortion destination, Lyons told Blaze News, "It certainly seems that way. And as a matter of fact, the Shield Act that was put in place was a direct result of the pressure that they were seeing outside of Massachusetts to let people know you can come here and we will protect you."
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Singer Olivia Rodrigo says her upcoming all-female music festival is dedicated to "advancing and advocating for women and girls."
Strangely, this seems to mostly translate to donating money to pro-abortion and race-based advocacy groups.
'I've had a dream of doing this festival for years.'
Rodrigo made headlines more than two years ago when she partnered with a national abortion network to give out emergency contraceptives — the morning-after pill — to concert attendees on her tour. After the story made the rounds, Rodrigo's publicity team put a stop to it and asked the group to cease handing out its packages that included two boxes of the pills and promotional codes that linked to an abortion fund.
Now, the 23-year-old has taken things a step further by hosting her own music festival to promote "meaningful change."
"Truly never felt more excited to share a piece of news with you all," Rodrigo wrote on X. "I've had a dream of doing this festival for years and i am so ecstatic its finally coming true!!"
The singer noted that "100 percent of the net proceeds will go to charities dedicated to advancing and advocating for women and girls."
These organizations include abortion clinic Planned Parenthood as well as several other abortion advocacy groups.
Other partners featured are the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which says it is invested in the "fight" to "expand access to abortion and contraception and advance health equity."
truly never felt more excited to share a piece of news with you all. i’ve had a dream of doing this festival for years and i am so ecstatic its finally coming true!! Daisy Chain Fields features an all-women lineup and 100 percent of the net proceeds will go to charities… pic.twitter.com/bPXHfLl1WJ
— Olivia Rodrigo (@oliviarodrigo) June 22, 2026
Race-centric advocacy groups are also getting support, including the Black Mamas Matter Alliance and the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health.
Another partner, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, notes that while it supports domestic workers, the women they back are "mostly women of color [and] immigrants" as well as "mothers and low-wage workers."
The company also has a directive dedicated to "black domestic workers," with the title "We Dream in Black."
The upcoming music festival takes place in August in Irvine, California, featuring artists like Doechii, Chappell Roan, and Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks as special guests.
Outlet Young Hollywood described the festival as a way to "bring women together," while creating a "safe and welcoming space" that will support "queer and female communities by donating profits to charities focused on social justice and helping women."
In 2021, Rodrigo visited President Joe Biden at the White House to promote COVID-19 vaccination among American youth, with the president claiming it was of the utmost importance for those ages 16 to 25 to get vaccinated.
At the time, Rodrigo said she was "beyond honored and humbled" to "help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccinations."
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