Pro-life advocates are pushing back hard against a ProPublica report that claims laws protecting unborn children are responsible for a rise in ectopic pregnancy deaths — and they say the real culprit is the Biden administration's reckless expansion of mail-order abortion drugs.
Janet Morana, a longtime pro-life leader and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, told Breitbart in an exclusive interview published Tuesday that the narrative pushed by ProPublica is not just misleading — it's a dangerous distraction from what's actually killing women.
"These deaths were not caused by pro-life laws," Morana said.
According to Breitbart, the ProPublica report found that 200 women died from 2020 to 2025 — compared to 100 in the six years prior — and blamed the spike on laws protecting babies from abortion. But the outlet's evidence, critics say, rests on little more than guesswork and anecdotal stories from two women who were allegedly turned away from hospitals in Texas and Arkansas.
The timing of the report is no coincidence.
When Joe Biden changed the rules to allow abortion drugs to be ordered online and delivered by mail, pro-life advocates issued urgent warnings. Their concern: women with undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies — a condition where a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube — could take the pills without ever knowing they were in danger.
Those warnings, it turns out, were prophetic.
Dr. Christina Francis of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists conducted a chilling experiment to test just how easy it is to get abortion pills through the mail. According to Breitbart, she went to the website of Aid Access, an overseas abortion pill distributor, posing as a 13-year-old girl taking blood thinners, with an intrauterine device in place, a history of three prior cesarean sections, and a previous ectopic pregnancy.
That's a laundry list of red flags that would stop any legitimate medical professional in their tracks. Instead, the pills arrived in her mailbox — in a state where abortion pills are banned.
Despite these clear protections, ProPublica claims confusion in the law is causing delays in care. This is not supported by the law itself. The Texas Medical Board has made clear that physicians who follow evidence-based medicine and standard emergency protocols face minimal legal risk.
The problem is not the law, but misinformation about the law. That misinformation has consequences.
When liberal media outlets misrepresent legal protections, they create unnecessary fear among physicians and hospital administrators. This confusion can lead to hesitation in providing care, which puts women at risk. Blaming pro-life laws only worsens the problem.
"Texas law clearly allows life-saving care for women," the report from LifeNews.com stated. "The real danger to women is being ignored—abortion pills."
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a preborn child implants outside the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube. Sadly, there is no way for the child to survive. In these tragic cases, the situation is not a question of whether the child will live, but whether the mother will face life-threatening complications if not treated.
Texas law recognizes this reality. The law allows physicians to act to save the mother's life. These cases are not considered abortion because the intent is not to end the life of the child, but to preserve the life of the mother.
Even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, Texas clarified that treatment for ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage is not abortion.
In 2025, Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act to further reinforce these protections. The law clarified that doctors do not need to wait until a condition becomes immediately life-threatening, and expanded the definition of ectopic pregnancy. If a serious risk is foreseeable, physicians are allowed to act. It also ensured that doctors and hospital legal teams are trained to properly apply the law.
This isn't the first time ProPublica has been accused of cooking the books to blame pro-life laws for tragic outcomes. In 2024, the outlet published an investigation into the deaths of two Georgia women who had taken abortion pills, insisting that Georgia's Heartbeat law was responsible — because, in ProPublica's telling, if the law hadn't been enacted, the women would have had surgical abortions instead.
Now they're running the same playbook.
Morana's message to Americans is simple: don't be fooled by headlines designed to scare you into supporting unlimited abortion. The real threat to women's health is a system that prioritizes abortion access over actual medical care — a system that mails deadly drugs to vulnerable women with no oversight, no examination, and no accountability.
Our Take
Folks, let's cut through the noise here. ProPublica — a left-leaning outlet that has spent years running interference for the abortion industry — wants you to believe that laws protecting unborn babies are killing women. That's not just false. It's a deliberate lie designed to advance a political agenda at the expense of women's lives.
Here's the truth: Pro-life laws across this country, including Texas's Life of the Mother Act, explicitly protect women in cases of ectopic pregnancy. Doctors are allowed — encouraged, even — to act to save the mother's life. No legitimate medical professional has ever been prosecuted for treating an ectopic pregnancy. The only "confusion" is the confusion that pro-abortion activists and their allies in the media have deliberately created by misrepresenting what these laws actually say.
Meanwhile, what's actually killing women? The Biden administration's decision to green-light mail-order abortion pills. These dangerous drugs are being shipped to women who have never been examined by a doctor, who may have life-threatening conditions like ectopic pregnancies, and who have no idea what they're putting into their bodies. Dr. Christina Francis proved you can literally claim to be a 13-year-old with every risk factor in the book and still get pills delivered to your door in a state where they're banned. That's not healthcare. That's a public health disaster.
And let's be clear about the stakes. The more medicine, even a tragic, non-viable pregnancy, becomes just another prescription delivered for convenience, the more dead women there will be. Not because of pro-life laws. Because of the abortion industry's relentless push to make abortion as easy as ordering a pizza — regardless of the cost in human life.
Janet Morana is right. The headlines are wrong. And the American people deserve to know the truth: pro-life laws save lives. Abortion pills end them.
What do you think? Should Congress step in to stop the deadly flow of abortion pills into our communities? Or will the media keep lying while women pay the price? Sound off in the comments below.
