Exclusive—Janet Morana: Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Were Not Caused by Pro-Life Laws

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.

That’s what’s happening, according to the news outlet ProPublica, which found that 200 women died from 2020 to 2025, compared to 100 for the six years before that. But 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. And they rely on a whole bunch of guesses and at least one outrageous lie.

Here’s 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.”

This is according to Ushma Upadhyay, who is identified as a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Studies on abortion performed by the University of California, San Francisco, generally find abortion to be safe and absolutely the right thing to do under any circumstances, so Upadhyay’s lie, while preposterous, is not surprising.

To understand how easy it is to order chemical abortion pills online, even if you are not pregnant and not a woman, consider these stories:

• 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, IL, 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. 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.

These are just three of many more cases like this across the country. It’s 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 abortion pill distributor Aid Access. Online, she posed as a 13-year-old girl taking blood thinners, with an intrauterine device in place, a history of three prior cesarean sections and ectopic pregnancy. The red flags raised there are almost too numerous to count.

Surely, Aid Access would deny her request for chemical abortion pills?

Nope. She received the pills in her mailbox, in a state where abortion pills are banned.

ProPublica’s report on ectopic pregnancy is based on supposition, guesswork and, given its left-leaning nature, wishful thinking. This is not surprising, considering the investigation the outlet did in 2024 about the death of two Georgia women who had taken abortion pills.

The outlet insisted Georgia’s Heartbeat law was responsible for their deaths, because if it hadn’t been enacted, the women would have had surgical abortions. In the real world, at least one of them died because chemical abortion is unsafe; the other had many other drugs in her system at autopsy. Chemical abortion was the culprit, not pro-life laws.

Founded in 2007, ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” In reality, it is a mouthpiece for the progressive causes dear to the heart of its funders.

From 2020-2-23, ProPublica received a $1 million grant from the Mariposa Foundation, a family foundation that since 1975 has issued grants to “those organizations with the vision to recognize opportunities for transformation,” according to its website. 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 the left-leaning megadonors to ProPublica, including George Soros, whose Foundation to Promote Open Society has given $3 million to the outlet.

Anything ProPublica writes about abortion should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Women dying from abortion is an outrage. Women dying from ectopic pregnancy is tragic and certainly needs to be more thoroughly studied and better understood. ProPublica does a disservice to all women by blaming these deaths on pro-life laws.

Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.