California bishops slam state for targeting abortion pill reversal: ‘Everyone should oppose this’

Two Catholic bishops are criticizing the California government’s targeting of abortion pill reversal ministries and urging support for the right of women to choose life, a cause the bishops argue people on all sides of the aisle should support.

Abortion pill reversal gives a mother the option to save the life of her child after she has taken the first chemical abortion pill. If she changes her mind, she can take the hormone progesterone to potentially save the child.

California’s attorney general is asking the Alameda County Superior Court to stop nonprofits Heartbeat International and RealOptions from offering this reversal, demanding up to $20 million in fines for alleged false advertising, with the government calling the measure “an unproven and largely experimental procedure.”

The state government is targeting those ministries for “telling women who regret swallowing the abortion pill that there is a medical treatment that can sometimes save their babies,” San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Oakland Bishop Michael Barber wrote in a July 30 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

Cordileone and Barber said that as priests they hear from many women who regret their abortions. Reading those depositions is “painful,” the bishops said.

They cited the case of Elizabeth Barrett, a woman who turned to abortion pill reversal through Heartbeat International and who ultimately gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Barrett testified in the case that she had originally felt pressured by Planned Parenthood staff to abort the baby.

“To be a Catholic priest these days, as we both are, is to have heard many similar stories of women who felt pressured to have an abortion they didn’t want,” they said. “Everyone should oppose this.”

The bishops argued that the California government aims to take away choices from women. The legal dispute “is a rare case that should bring together both sides of the abortion debate,” the bishops wrote.

“In particular, it tests the souls of those who claim the platform of ‘pro-choice.’ What kind of people see a pregnant woman who wants to reverse the effects of an abortion pill and think, ‘Let’s punish the nonprofits that informed her she has a choice’?” they said.

This is not the only case targeting abortion pill reversal, the bishops pointed out. New York state’s attorney general has filed a similar lawsuit against Heartbeat International.

People of faith have a particular call to support women in these scenarios, the bishops said.

“[T]hese women especially need support from the religious — those who hold that creation in God’s image means life is endowed with a dignity that can’t be trampled by a government determined to punish those who oppose unquestioned abortion,” they said.