An abortion pill study published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Green Journal failed to disclose glaring conflicts of interest by authors — including one who openly profits from the sale of the abortion pill through an online abortion pill dispensary — and appears to ignore FDA safeguards.
Key Takeaways:
- ACOG claims to be the “premier professional membership organization for obstetrician–gynecologists,” but it is far from unbiased where abortion is concerned. ACOG has referred for, advocated for, and promoted abortion for decades.
- ACOG’s Green Journal published a study on the “advance provision” of the abortion pill — which means dispensing the drug to women who are not pregnant, “just in case” they need it — which failed to disclose authors’ clear conflicts of interest.
- The authors have every reason to promote advance provision of abortion drugs, as many benefit directly or indirectly from expanded access to the abortion pill.
- Advance provision of the abortion pill is not FDA-approved, despite Big Abortion’s promotion of the idea.
The Details:
Published in May 2025 in ACOG’s Green Journal, the cross-sectional study on advance provision of the abortion pill (when women receive the pill before they actually become pregnant, for later use), “Telehealth Medication Abortion: Comparing Advance-Provision Patients With Pregnant Patients,” was authored by Anna E. Fiastro, Elissa Brown, Peyton Smith, Erin K. Thayer, Emily M. Godfrey, and Rebecca Gomperts.
The study indicated that the “authors did not report any potential conflicts of interest,” when there were conflicts of interest; the fact that ACOG Green Journal editors allowed such a claim reveals the Journal’s inability to scrutinize abortion claims.
ACOG Green Journal Advanced Provision abortion pill study failed to note conflicts
The importance of transparency in research
ACOG’s Green Journal claims to follow “recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics [COPE]” and the “International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).” Both COPE and ICMJE stress the importance of transparency about study authors’ conflicting interests, with ICMJE noting:
Public trust in the scientific process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how transparently an author’s relationships and activities, directly or topically related to a work, are handled during the planning, implementation, writing, peer review, editing, and publication of scientific work.
COPE additionally notes that “Journals do have editorial responsibility as to how papers are presented.”
ICMJE emphasized more than once the importance of maintaining credibility and public trust in research:
Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable, the ones most often judged to represent potential conflicts of interest and thus the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself….
Yet the advance-provision study failed to disclose potential financial ties from author Rebecca Gomperts.
A failure to cite authors’ conflicts of interest
Rebecca Gomperts, Author:
- Dutch abortionist, co-founder of Women on Web and Women on Waves
- Founded Aid Access in 2018 to utilize telemedicine for abortion, shipping the drugs across the United States
- Licensed to practice medicine in Austria (not the U.S.) and reportedly obtained her medical degree from the University of Amsterdam
The advance-provision abortion pill study “does not include follow-up data” focused on the 27 states “that were served by U.S. licensed providers [of Aid Access] during the timeframe” and were distributed in advance for “<13 weeks gestation,” authors clarified to editors.
Aid Access supplies so-called “advance provision” abortion pills to women who are not pregnant. In 2022, Gomperts told Politico she hoped U.S. doctors would start to do likewise to evade abortion restrictions “by writing a prescription for perfectly lawful medications for someone who is not, in fact, pregnant.”
All of this is entirely breaking FDA protocols.
Any promotion of the abortion pill — advanced or otherwise — directly impacts the pockets of Gomperts, which is a conflict. And despite editors referencing Aid Access multiple times in their correspondence to the authors, they failed to require a conflict disclosure from Gomperts.
Anna E. Fiastro, Author:
- Former Planned Parenthood intern who leads the “We Won’t Go Back” Initiative, “a University of Washington program to mentor and support primary care clinicians and staff to implement or grow abortion and reproductive health services in UW Medicine” which launched the “Medication Abortion Access in Primary Care Learning Collaborative” to “support clinics to provide medication abortion.”
- Oversees UW’s “Access Delivered” program, which “collaborates with clinicians to integrate telehealth abortion care into routine services” and “partners with advocacy organizations, local clinics, and clinicians in 20 states to expand telehealth medication abortion services across the U.S.”
Emily Godfrey, Author:
- Oversees UW’s “Access Delivered” program (described above under Fiastro)
- Society of Family Planning (SFP) Fellow
- Faculty of UW’s Complex Family Planning Fellowship” — an abortion training program usually operated in conjunction with Ryan Residency programs
- Serves as a “current member of the expert committee on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)”
According to the UW program:
Family Planning at UW Medicine takes place at the Family Planning Clinic, part of the OB/GYN and Primary Care at UW Medicine – Roosevelt clinic. Some of our faculty provide care at Harborview Medical Center and the VA. Our core faculty and fellows also provide abortion care several days a month at the Cedar River Clinics.
Cedar River Clinics are an abortion chain in Washington State.
Elissa Brown and Erin K. Thayer, Authors:
- Involved in UW’s “Access Delivered”
The study was supported by the University of Washington Foundation Family Planning Fund. The Foundation has been financed by the Gates Foundation, which also funds DKT International, a worldwide distributor of abortion pills.
“The study used a convenience sample from electronic medical record data between August 2021 and March 2023 of patients in 25 U.S. states and the District of Columbia who received abortion medications through Aid Access, a U.S. clinician-supported asynchronous telemedicine abortion service,” authors wrote, without mentioning Gomperts’ involvement.
And of course, the authors concluded:
Expanding access to advance provision through other telemedicine platforms and in clinical settings can help assess its ability to reach historically marginalized communities and those most affected by geographic barriers and legal restrictions.
Broader implementation and further research on the attitudes toward advance provision of those who experience more structural disadvantage in accessing abortion care are essential to understanding the potential of advance provision to enhance access to critical reproductive health care.
Reality Check:
→Mifepristone isn’t even FDA-approved for ‘advance provision.’←
Live Action News previously documented how Big Abortion’s media darling, Dr. Daniel Grossman — an abortionist with ties to an organization recently funded by the abortion pill’s manufacturer — promoted the unapproved and dangerous idea that abortionists should dispense the abortion pill to women before they become pregnant.
Advance provision is a moniker denoting one more way the abortion industry is flouting the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) REMS safety requirements. To be approved to prescribe the abortion pill (mifepristone 200mg), prescribers must be able to properly date a pregnancy.
Selling abortion pills in advance of a pregnancy is clearly ignoring the intent of the FDA’s safety requirement.
The FDA has thus far failed to hold Danco and GenBioPro (the manufacturers) accountable for properly policing their prescribers and decertifying anyone who violates the FDA’s REMS.
Instead, states (which are not approved prescribers) are stockpiling the drugs while abortion advocates indiscriminately distribute the abortion pill with no verification of pregnancy. This outrageous violation of REMS safety regulations has likely led to multiple women being slipped abortion-inducing drugs by men seeking to terminate women’s desired pregnancies.
The FDA previously warned shipping women (or teens) abortion pills in advance of verified pregnancies is risky, despite the fact that media abortion allies advocate for it. In 2022, Politico wrote, “The FDA said health providers prescribing abortion medication to people who aren’t pregnant are acting without its authorization and that the practice is potentially dangerous for patients.”
The outlet added (emphases added):
The FDA spokesperson told POLITICO that if mifepristone, which stops the flow of hormones supporting a fetus in the uterus, were prescribed before a patient is pregnant, providers wouldn’t be able to properly oversee care to ensure safety and effectiveness. Abortion medication is regulated more tightly by the FDA than other drugs, restricting how the regimen can be prescribed.
[T]he FDA is concerned that if patients were to take mifepristone weeks or months after getting a prescription filled, a medical professional may not be able to assess if a pregnancy is intrauterine or ectopic or date pregnancies properly. The drug is only approved through 70 days gestation for abortions.
The Bottom Line:
Transparency and credibility in research is critical. The abortion industry has not been forthright in disclosing conflicts of interest in this most recent study or in previous studies regarding the abortion pill. Dispensing the abortion pill before a woman is pregnant puts her health at increased risk due to lack of proper assessment by a prescriber.
Women are already put at risk with the current “no-test” abortion pill protocol; giving the abortion pill to women before they are even pregnant — as if they were giving Tylenol to women to have on hand just in case of headaches — is simply irresponsible, and breaks all of the FDA’s current safety protocols on a drug that has a serious adverse event rate of 11%, according to recent analyses.
The question (to which we already know the unfortunate answer) is, does the abortion industry really care?
