On an otherwise ordinary Monday, Elizabeth Gillette walked into the law firm where she worked in Salem, Oregon, and told no one of what she had done the last Friday, as though what had happened had never happened. It was secret. Ms. Gillette’s colleagues may or may not have noticed the symptoms she was experiencing that persisted: nausea, chills, and profuse feminine bleeding. Although she could have called in sick, she told The Epoch Times, that would have raised suspicion, and so she struggled through the day in physical and mental anguish.
Besides physical anguish—which she portrays as excruciating abdominal pain that no Tylenol or home remedy would soothe, leaving her curled into the fetal position on the bathroom floor, rendering her going into labor while laying in a pool of her own blood—there was also the mental and emotional torment. That left lasting scars. She saw and held her perfectly formed tiny baby in a clear amniotic sack in her bloodied hands and the sight was forever branded in her mind.
Even today, Ms. Gillette, now 36 and a mother of four, says she feels the effects of PTSD. She is haunted by the wailing of phantom babies when she passes dumpsters—as in her panic, she had flushed her embryo down the toilet. Her baby is now “in a septic tank,” she says, “filled with human waste—that’s where he’s buried.” She also describes feeling instantly transported back to the bathroom and covered in blood when she hears young children crying in a restaurant. And there are the nightmares, she says, which can be no less disturbing and powerful.
The administering of her treatment may have risen to the level of medical malpractice, according to Ms. Gillette, who claims the staff who did her ultrasound told her that the baby’s heart wasn’t beating, meaning he was dead, implying that taking the medication wouldn’t be killing. But that was a “bald-faced lie,” Ms. Gillette told The Epoch Times, “because I found out later on that, if that was true, then it would have been malpractice for her to prescribe the first medication to me because I didn’t need it.” The first pill starves the embryo while the second induces labor to expel the baby. “If she was telling the truth, then I would not have needed to take the first medication,” she said.
The Planned Parenthood clinic had made it rather easy for her to get the procedure and, she claims, wouldn’t take no for an answer. They kept the pressure on right from the time she called until she left the building. They said she would need surgery if she didn’t gulp the pill, according to the mom, and insisted on seeing her swallow the first abortion pill she was administered before letting her leave.
The second, taken 24 hours later, induced labor and “was excruciating,” according to the mom. “Within 20 minutes, I went into labor. ... I’ve been through labor four times and that was labor,” she said. “I was shaking, I was sweating, I was nauseous and vomiting, I had diarrhea. It was completely horrible excruciating pain. Nothing could ease the pain—hot packs, Tylenol, Advil, a hot water bottle.”
These side effects struck like an ambush, unlike what she was told. There was “no warning, there were no counseling sessions,” she said. “Nobody told me that it would be dangerous. They told me it would be like a double period, and I would feel some cramping, some extra blood, some clotting. And then I could go back to work the next day.”
If the level of malpractice described by Ms. Gillette was occurring on a large scale when she had her abortion in 2011, it was made imminently easier for women to gain access to abortion drugs in March 2016 when the FDA jettisoned multiple of its original safety standards. The number of in-person visits to get abortion pills was reduced from three down to one. The scope of who could administer abortions was expanded beyond doctors, and the term limit for chemical abortions was extended from 7 to 10 weeks gestation. No longer were non-fatal complications required to be reported.
In April 2021, amid COVID, the FDA implemented what was supposed to be a temporary removal of in-person dispensing for the duration of the public health emergency. But in December 2021, the administration announced this removal of in-person dispensing was permanent—an act that Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys called “reckless” and said has “endangered the health and safety of women and girls.”
ADF has represented doctors, associations and individuals, of patients harmed by abortion drugs. They filed a lawsuit against the FDA in 2022, and a federal district court halted its actions the following year. In 2023, a federal district court’s order stood in the U.S. Court of Appeals, requiring partial restoration of the FDA’s critical safety standards for abortion drugs.
What does Ms. Gillette want? Last week, she told The Epoch Times: “If the Supreme Court does not force the FDA to reinstate [their safety standards], these women are going to go through exactly what I went through. And that is a tragedy. So, speaking out, people need to know the truth. People need to know that there are two sides to every story, no matter how flat you make the pancake. And our side is valid, too. And my story matters, too. And I’m not alone.”
