In Vogue, Emma Specter wrote about the experiences of five women who had chemical abortions. In four out of the five stories featured, the experience was described as painful and horrifying.
Mia noted, “I was amply prepared for the bleeding, but not for the pain—I eventually woke them up to help me set up a heating pad and procure enough edibles to tranquilize a bear. Both of those helped a lot, but I still spent a few hours in enough pain to be incoherent.”
Jen’s experience of pain was just as intense, but not as lengthy, and she was surprised by it. “I went to sleep and woke up to barely having bled in my diaper, which I brushed off. I went to work like nothing at all, but was suddenly hit with a wall of pain at around 10 a.m.,” she said.
Claire recalled, again, “intense” pain for which she wasn’t prepared. “I spent the whole first day at Planned Parenthood, in and out of the waiting room. I was given the first of the two-pill cocktail in the Planned Parenthood office and then was sent home to take the second pill the following day,” she said. “When I took the second pill, my body didn’t like it. I started cramping so intensely, and each time I went to the toilet, little gloops of blood clots and tissue swirled into the toilet. It was honestly surreal. I kept cramping and got sicker, and I ended up throwing up a lot. But by the end of the night (I started at maybe 4 p.m.) my body was returning to normal—still cramping, but more at ease. … The abortion pill can be very painful, and I feel I wasn’t properly warned about how sick I could get. I thought I could just chill out and cramp it out, but it wasn’t like that at all.
Alina noted that she was left with essentially no resources during her abortion. “I was lucky to have a supportive partner who was able to take care of me, but truthfully, it was a difficult and painful experience in a lot of ways — until the next morning, when I was just tired,” she recalled. “I went through Planned Parenthood, they also gave me a phone number to call if I experienced any worrisome complications, and then it turned out that number wasn’t connected.”
Unfortunately, the pain these women experienced could have been worse. One study found the abortion pill to be four times more dangerous than first trimester surgical abortion. Aside from pain, more serious complications include uterine hemorrhaging, viral infections, sepsis, vaginitis, and even death.*
Adapted from “Vogue features horrifying stories of chemical abortions: ‘I wasn’t properly warned’” by Live Action