The Daily Caller, a right-wing propaganda mill masquerading as a news outlet, published an op-ed by Lila Rose on May 2, 2025, titled “The Abortion Pill Is Poison, Not Medicine.” That headline tells you everything. It’s an ideological manifesto loaded with pseudo-medical jargon, emotional blackmail, and outright misinformation. The Caller has long been a vessel for reactionary drivel, but this piece is a particular case study in how the anti-abortion movement launders theological doctrine through the language of public health.

It’s a tactical assault on reproductive medicine wrapped in the veneer of science. That’s what makes it dangerous. And as unsurprising as it is, it’s important to track what these publications are pushing, not because their arguments are good, but because their talking points still spread like wildfire—through cable news, congressional hearings, and social media pile-ons. This is what they’re loading into the chamber. And we can’t just ignore it and hope that it goes away.

“The abortion pill is not medicine. It is a dangerous drug designed to end the life of an innocent human child, and as new evidence shows, it’s gravely harming the women it claims to help.”

The opening line sets the script: moral panic disguised as scientific concern. Calling mifepristone “not medicine” is a lie so brazen it dares you into silence. It is medicine. It’s been approved by the FDA for over two decades. It’s on the WHO’s list of essential medications. It’s prescribed by licensed physicians around the world. But Rose isn’t trying to inform—she’s trying to delegitimize the concept of reproductive healthcare entirely. And by calling every fertilized egg an “innocent human child,” she removes any room for complexity, nuance, or real-world medical ethics. You either agree with her, or you’re an accessory to murder.

“A new, unprecedented study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center has uncovered what the abortion industry does not want you to know: over 10 percent of women who take the abortion pill experience serious, sometimes life-threatening complications.”

The so-called “study” she cites is from a conservative think tank with a long history of anti-abortion advocacy—not a medical institution, not peer-reviewed, not neutral. Framing it as some suppressed revelation only works if you pretend decades of global clinical research don’t exist. The number—10 percent—is thrown out without context or verification. No explanation of what qualifies as “serious.” No comparison to complication rates for childbirth, tonsillectomies, or even aspirin. Just a big number and a scary word: sepsis. This is not science. It’s marketing. The product is fear.

“When the FDA first approved mifepristone in 2000, it did so by redefining pregnancy itself as a ‘serious or life-threatening illness.’ That grotesque lie allowed it to be fast-tracked through the approval process…”

There was no such redefinition. This is a deliberate distortion of regulatory language. The FDA’s accelerated approval processes include pathways for conditions where lack of access to treatment can cause serious harm. That includes abortion access. The point wasn’t that pregnancy is a disease—it’s that being forced to carry an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy can have severe physical and psychological consequences. But again, accuracy isn’t the goal here. The goal is to frame the FDA as a criminal accomplice. Rose wants the reader to believe that a massive, coordinated deception was orchestrated to “sneak” abortion pills into the marketplace. The conspiracy theory writes itself.

“Dangerous abortion drugs are shipped directly to her doorstep, leaving her to face severe bleeding, infection, and even life-threatening complications alone in her bathroom. Her baby is often born dead in the toilet.”

This is where the piece shifts from dishonest to grotesque. The imagery is calculated to horrify: a woman alone, bleeding, traumatized, a dead baby in a toilet. It’s cinematic—and medically misleading. The vast majority of medication abortions are safe, uneventful, and completed privately at home with full knowledge of what to expect. The emotional blackmail here erases the reality of women who choose this method because it’s less invasive, more private, and medically appropriate. It also ignores that miscarriages—common, natural events—often happen the same way. Rose exploits what’s intimate and vulnerable and reframes it as monstrous.

“Let’s be clear. Even if the abortion pill harmed zero women, it would still be gravely unjust. Because every time it works as intended, a child is killed.”

That’s the real agenda. Everything else is window dressing. All the talk of safety, all the cherry-picked stats, all the outrage about FDA processes—it’s just a scaffold for this single belief: that any abortion is murder. That belief is fine to hold in a church pew. But when it’s used as the basis for public health policy, it becomes a cudgel. If the harm to women doesn’t matter—if even a risk-free abortion is framed as a homicide—then there’s no policy compromise, no regulatory reform, no science that can change the conversation. It’s an absolutist position posing as a safety warning.

This is how the anti-choice right launders extremism. They borrow the language of medicine to push theological mandates. They take selective data from ideologically aligned institutions and inflate it into a crisis. They paint federal agencies as corrupt, doctors as killers, and pregnant women as duped victims. And they do it all in publications like the Daily Caller, which will publish any hysterical screed that aligns with the culture war playbook.

You might not take it seriously—but plenty of people do. This kind of rhetoric bleeds into laws, policies, and lives. It’s echoed by Republican lawmakers and parroted on Fox News. It becomes talking points for campaigns and ammunition for court challenges. That’s why it matters. Not because it’s persuasive, but because it’s strategic.

The abortion pill is one of the safest medications ever approved for public use. It is safer than Tylenol. Safer than Viagra. The Daily Caller would never run a headline calling those drugs “poison.” But mifepristone is different, not because of what it does, but because of what it represents: bodily autonomy, medical privacy, and the idea that women don’t need permission to make decisions about their lives.

That’s what Rose—and the Caller—can’t tolerate. So they lie. And publish it with a straight face.

This post was originally published on this site