OPINION:
Sixteen years ago, I was a 20-year-old nursing student working part-time in my family’s business and trying to build a future. Then I got pregnant.
Fear came first, not because I didn’t want my baby but because I knew how the people around me would react. My older brother responded to my positive pregnancy test by punching and breaking a window. My boyfriend’s reaction was quieter but far more devastating: “There are other options.”
What followed were hours of pressure from him and others, all insisting abortion was the “best” and “only” choice.
I went to Planned Parenthood alone.
An ultrasound confirmed I was eight weeks pregnant. I was told I was a “great candidate” for abortion drugs and was assured the process would be like a heavy period. I was not warned about the hemorrhaging or infection or that I would pass my very visible child.
When I asked whether the drugs could fail, a staff member laughed and said it was nearly impossible, that it was “one in a million.”
I took the first pills and immediately regretted it.
I began crying and asked whether it was too late to change my mind. Instead of receiving support or alternatives, I was told that if I continued the pregnancy, my baby would be born with severe disabilities. That claim — false, as I later learned — terrified me into continuing. Years later, I discovered abortion pill reversal existed at the time and could have saved my baby. No one told me. That omission still haunts me.
I was sent home to take the second pills alone. They caused unbearable pain. I bled for hours in a bathroom while my boyfriend and his friends watched TV outside. Blood pooled on the floor. Traumatized, I saw parts of my baby.
Two weeks later, I nearly died.
At my follow-up appointment — again, alone — I was told the abortion drugs had failed. I was hemorrhaging and on the brink of a life-threatening infection. If I hadn’t returned, I would not be alive today. I was rushed into an emergency dilation and curettage. The room was visibly unclean. I saw bloody instruments from another abortion. I heard women screaming in the hallways and was told they were “being dramatic.”
This happened under so-called medical oversight, and it nearly killed me.
The physical trauma was only the beginning. Emotionally, I collapsed. I dropped out of nursing school. I became addicted to drugs and alcohol. I self-harmed. I wrote suicide notes. For years, I lived numb, empty and broken. A part of me died with my baby, and another part died in that Planned Parenthood.
By the grace of God, I eventually found healing. Today, I am the executive director of a pregnancy center, counseling women every day who stand where I once stood. I also walk with women who carry the silent grief of past abortions — grief that never truly disappears.
That is why I am speaking out now.
During the COVID-19 emergency, the Biden administration removed long-standing safeguards and allowed abortion drugs to be sent through the mail nationwide — no ultrasound, no in-person exam and often no confirmation of pregnancy. That policy remains in place today. The push to normalize mail-order abortion drugs is dangerous and deeply dishonest.
If abortion drugs can maim or kill women when they are dispensed in person, how much more dangerous are they when shipped through the mail with no verification of gestational age, no screening for ectopic pregnancy, no follow-up appointment and no real accountability? Many online sellers simply mail pills and disappear. That has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with ideology.
These drugs are, by design, deadly for the child and increasingly dangerous for the woman.
President Trump has an immediate opportunity to act. Rolling back the Biden-era mail-order abortion drug policy would not require legislation. It would simply restore commonsense protections that existed for years. It would save lives — both unborn children and the women who carry them — and prevent countless women from enduring physical trauma, emotional devastation and lifelong grief.
Shipping abortion drugs is government-sanctioned harm. It does not have to be. I share my story because silence nearly killed me and because truth can still save others and their children.
• Dora Esparza is an abortion drug survivor and executive director at a Texas pregnancy resource center.
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