Planned Parenthood recently launched an online campaign to teach people about ‘at-home abortion’ incentivizing women with the “abortion pill,” according to the Center for Human and Family Rights, prompting March for Life to criticize the move for jeopardizing women’s health.

"Planned Parenthood continues to put women's lives at risk as it facilitates the sale of illegal abortion pills,” March for Life, a pro-life group that organizes marches across the country, said in a tweet. “The abortion company even instructs women to lie to healthcare providers if they experience complications from a self-induced abortion.”

The Planned Parenthood online course promoted HowToUseAbortionPill.org run by anonymous non-profit organizations. The website advises women to dispose of “anything recognizable” no matter the state or country’s abortion laws, C-Fam says in a news report.

The site credits the World Health Organization (WHO), which, according to its “self-care guidance,” encourages women to disregard the legal ramifications of their actions, the article continues.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation not only is the largest provider of abortions, but it also advocates for lenient abortion laws nationwide including claiming credit for “successfully advocat[ing] for the country registration of medical abortion drugs and for their inclusion into national essential medicine lists.”

The WHO has a “global essential medicines list” that includes abortion pills, which was moved to a “core” medicine in 2019, removing “a caveat saying it should be used with close medical supervision.”

Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron has spoken against abortion before, including once in a recent video.

“Opposition to abortion is not a doctrine, in the strict sense of the term, but rather a conclusion drawn from moral reasoning and from the findings of objective science,” Barron said in the video. “It’s an indisputable fact that human life, which is to say a living human being with a distinctive genetic structure identity, comes into existence at the moment of conception. It’s furthermore a fundamental axiom of ethics that innocent human life ought never to be attacked”.

The “abortion pill” typically consists of five pills: one mifepristone pill and four misoprostol pills, according to A Woman’s Choice. For two to four weeks after the pills are taken, most women experience cramping, bleeding, nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, diarrhea and headaches. Some women experience blood clots, severe abdominal and back pain or continued pregnancy.

Psychological side effects are more common and longer-lasting than physical side effects and include depression, regret, guilt, anger, loneliness, nightmares, loss of self-confidence, relationship problems and suicidal ideation, according to the American Pregnancy Association cited on the Women’s Choice website. Some women also experience fatal bacterial infections or fatal toxic shock as a result of abortion pills.

An analysis of Medicaid data found that emergency room visits as a result of medical abortions increased by 500% between 2002 and 2015, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) reported.

“The safety of chemical abortion is greatly exaggerated,” CLI Vice President of Data Analytics Dr. James Studnicki said. “In fact, the increasing dominance of chemical abortion and its disproportionate contribution to emergency room morbidity is a serious public health threat, and the real-world data suggests the threat is growing. Women are far more likely to visit the emergency room following a chemical rather than surgical abortion. The rate of these emergency room visits is growing remarkably fast. It is therefore terrifying that the FDA is actively being pressured to eliminate longstanding public health safeguards on the abortion pill. This comprehensive data advocates for the FDA to strengthen, rather than weaken, medical oversight of chemical abortion.”

The Catholic Church has maintained a strong stance against abortion for centuries, regardless of evolving biological theories about when exactly life begins, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). According to the Catechism, "Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law" (No. 2271).