Abortion pills are becoming more common among women seeking to abort their offspring, and the availability of these pills online is growing, allowing women to avoid going to an abortion clinic entirely.

Numerous news outlets have reported on the efforts of Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts to expand her 13-year-old internet abortion-pill business Women on Web into the U.S. Gomperts, who launched her U.S. push in April, has received awards from Planned Parenthood and various feminist groups and is also known for her environmental activism.

Reports in the mainstream media have portrayed Gomperts’ efforts as heroic or at least worthwhile, while the perspective of pro-life groups has been given only minimal attention. A story in the Atlantic noted that,

For American women who’ve wanted pills, though, there’s been one major problem: Women on Web wouldn’t ship to the United States. American women could (and do) instead search online for abortion pills, but some of the medicines and pharmacies they’ve found have been less than reliable. Now Women on Web’s founder, a doctor named Rebecca Gomperts, has launched a new service that she says is just as safe as Women on Web, and it does ship to the United States. The cost is $95, but the website says the service will try to help women who can’t pay.

Just like Women on Web, the new service, Aid Access, will screen women for their eligibility to take the pills—they should not be more than nine weeks pregnant—through an online process. (If the pills are taken later, they are less likely to work.) Gomperts will herself fill each woman’s prescription for misoprostol and mifepristone, which together are about 97 percent effective in causing an abortion within the first trimester and already account for a third of all abortions in the United States. She then sends the prescriptions to an Indian pharmacy she trusts, and it ships the pills to women at their homes in the United States.

The market for abortion pills and for buying them online is growing in the U.S. because of their low cost and convenience, because of tightening state restrictions on surgical abortions, and because of the belief that a Trump-era U.S. Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade.

Gomperts was previously hesitant to sell the pills to women in the U.S. because of the strong pro-life movement here. She has established the new, separate service Aid Access so as not to jeopardize Women on Web. In an interview with Mother Jones, Gomperts characterized what she is doing as “humanitarian aid.”

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of abortion pills in 2000, but selling them over the internet through unregulated channels might violate U.S. laws and the FDA has said it is evaluating whether any laws are being broken. Americans United for Life told CNN that Gomperts’ push to sell pills in the U.S. is “reckless and irresponsible.”

Abortion clinics have been providing pills for women up to 10 weeks along in their pregnancies, so they can have what’s called a medical, or chemical, abortion. Mifepristone, also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex, cuts off nutrition to the baby growing in a mother’s womb. The mother then takes misoprostol, typically within 48 hours, which causes intense contractions. Abortion activists misleadingly characterize what happens next as a miscarriage to mask the deliberate taking of a life.

Many women now prefer the idea of having an abortion in the comfort of their own homes as opposed to undergoing a procedure at a clinic, which they consider more invasive and less private. But pro-life groups say a growing number of women are emotionally traumatized by the process, especially if they are not prepared for the possibility of seeing what is clearly a developing baby get expelled from their bodies.

According to LifeSiteNews, chemical abortions put women at a greater risk of being traumatized: “At home, a woman may actually see the remains of her baby, sometimes while alone and in great physical pain…. ‘Those who do see more [by using the abortion pill] have more nightmares, more trauma symptoms.’”

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said earlier this month, “It’s hard to imagine a society any more dangerous and any more deadly than a society that will kill unborn life in the womb by a pill.”

Mohler said Gomperts’ efforts to sell abortion pills online to women in the U.S. reflects “the desperation of the pro-abortion movement, so determined to make abortion available to as many as possible, as quickly as possible, in as uncomplicated a manner as possible, whether or not the law is on their side.”

Women having second thoughts after taking the first abortion pill, RU-486, can potentially get the effects reversed and continue their pregnancies, according to Heartbeat International. The success rate is 64 to 68 percent, according to the group’s Abortion Pill Reversal website. The website can be found at abortionpillreversal.com. There’s also a 24/7 helpline number, 877-558-0333.

Read more:

Yale Now Sells Abortion Drugs From A Vending Machine (The Daily Wire)

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Nearly half of Americans continue to be “Bible users,” according to the State of the Bible 2018 report published by Barna research in July in partnership with the American Bible Society.

The Barna Group defines “Bible users” as “individuals who read, listen to or pray with the Bible on their own at least 3-4 times a year, outside of a church service or church event.”

The study found that 14 percent of adults use the Bible daily, while 13 percent use it several times a week, 8 percent once a week, 6 percent about once a month and 8 percent three to four times a year. The report notes that “Bible use has remained relatively consistent since 2011.”

Those most likely to engage with the Bible include Baby Boomers, Southerners, and those who live in cities and small towns or rural areas as opposed to the suburbs. Print versions still have strong appeal, but more are also turning to digital and audio forms and podcasts.

Nearly six in 10 adults believe the Bible has transformed their lives, with married people and those with children under 18 being more likely to say so, according to the report.

The introduction to the report strikes a hopeful note, saying “the results show that, despite shifting cultural trends, Americans still read the Word, and it remains a powerful, transformative tool in their life.”

However, the report comes at a time of growing support for changes in secular culture that are uprooting America’s Christian influence, with some of that erosion happening within the church itself. While many Americans may say they still pick up the Bible, some Christian leaders are warning that their understanding of it is superficial and leading to greater compromise with the culture.

Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report saying that 62 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage, including 35 percent of white evangelical Protestants. Support is higher – at 47 percent – among white evangelicals born after 1964. A Gallup poll released earlier this year found that 67 percent of all Americans now support same-sex marriage, up from 27 percent in 1996, when Gallup first posed the question.

The Barna Group in other studies in recent years has drawn attention to cultural changes affecting the church. In 2010, Barna research released a report on “how the religious environment in the U.S. is morphing into something new.” The report said the church is becoming “less theologically literate” and that “growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of learning pragmatic solutions for life.” The report also sounded an alarm about “the postmodern insistence on tolerance”:

Our biblical illiteracy and lack of spiritual confidence has caused Americans to avoid making discerning choices for fear of being labeled judgmental. The result is a Church that has become tolerant of a vast array of morally and spiritually dubious behaviors and philosophies. This increased leniency is made possible by the very limited accountability that occurs within the body of Christ. There are fewer and fewer issues that Christians believe churches should be dogmatic about. The idea of love has been redefined to mean the absence of conflict and confrontation, as if there are no moral absolutes that are worth fighting for. That may not be surprising in a Church in which a minority believes there are moral absolutes dictated by the scriptures.

The challenge today is for Christian leaders to achieve the delicate balance between representing truth and acting in love. The challenge for every Christian in the U.S. is to know his/her faith well enough to understand which fights are worth fighting, and which stands are non-negotiable. There is a place for tolerance in Christianity; knowing when and where to draw the line appears to perplex a growing proportion of Christians in this age of tolerance.

In 2016, Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published an essay calling for the church to address the problem of biblical illiteracy. His essay cited Barna research that found that 60 percent of Americans couldn’t name five of the Ten Commandments. Mohler wrote:

Christians who lack biblical knowledge are the products of churches that marginalize biblical knowledge. Bible teaching now often accounts for only a diminishing fraction of the local congregation’s time and attention. The move to small group ministry has certainly increased opportunities for fellowship, but many of these groups never get beyond superficial Bible study.

Youth ministries are asked to fix problems, provide entertainment, and keep kids busy. How many local-church youth programs actually produce substantial Bible knowledge in young people?

Even the pulpit has been sidelined in many congregations. Preaching has taken a back seat to other concerns in corporate worship. The centrality of biblical preaching to the formation of disciples is lost, and Christian ignorance leads to Christian indolence and worse.

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