A woman who considers herself the victim of a chemical abortion says she “was not prepared for how severe and devastating” the abortion-inducing drugs she took would be.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Elizabeth Gillette said she took prescribed drugs in 2010 to abort her unborn baby.
She now deeply regrets the abortion, Gillette said.
In graphic terms, Gillette described her experience 14 years ago to Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan outside the Supreme Court Building as the nine justices heard oral arguments Tuesday in two cases centered on abortion-inducing pills such as mifepristone and misoprostol.
“I found myself on the bathroom floor, covered in a pool of blood, wondering if I was going to survive the procedure, completely alone,” Gillette said.
“I reached down and lifted out of my body the perfectly formed transparent sac with a recognizable baby inside,” she told Olohan.
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As Gillette spoke, activists on both sides of the chemical abortion issue rallied outside the Supreme Court in anticipation of oral arguments in the two cases, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.
Last year, the FDA approved the use of chemical abortion drugs without earlier safeguards, which pro-life activists consider dangerous.
“It was so incredibly traumatic,” Gillette said of her own experience with abortion-inducing drugs. “I suffered horrific side effects, not only physical … to this day, I still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“It’s something that has followed me since that day,” she added.
She was between six and seven weeks pregnant when she took unspecified chemical abortion pills, Gillette recalled.
“They said it was going to be like a double period, and that just wasn’t true,” she said. “No one told me that I would hold my child in my hands and would need to decide what to do with that body. I ultimately flushed him down the toilet, into the septic tank.”
Fourteen years later, Gillette said, she relives that moment of being “terrified, wondering if I’m going to survive, hoping and wishing that I would be able to get out of that situation.”
“Nobody was there to help me. I was completely alone,” she told Olohan.
Use of the abortion drugs she obtained was subject to restrictions at the time, she said, but she doesn’t think she received the care to which she was legally entitled.
“So imagine now, with no restrictions in place, what is a woman going to experience without any of that care?” Gillette asked.
“This isn’t something that’s safe, like Tylenol,” she said. “This is something that will follow women for the rest of their lives.”
“I am here today at the U.S. Supreme Court because I want the FDA to do its job,” she said. “I want them to keep women safe.”
Another woman, Catherine Herring, told The Daily Signal that she “got violently ill” after her husband spiked drinks with an abortion-inducing drug.
“I ended up in an emergency room, with a urine sample that was black in color,” Herring said.
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Herring said she had severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, and bleeding after consuming the drugs. She currently suffers from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.
“Medical personnel need to be involved. For the states that continue to offer abortion pills, there need to be safety standards,” Herring told The Daily Signal.