🔍Fact Check: Is 'abortifacient birth control' even a thing?

There is no such thing as “abortifacient birth control.”

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🔍Fact Check: Is "abortifacient birth control" even a thing?

Last week, a Trump administration spokesperson for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) told the New York Times that the reason the administration is planning to incinerate $10 million worth of contraceptives - intended for impoverished women who wish to prevent unwanted pregnancies and living in the poorest countries on the planet - is because the contraceptives are “abortifacients.” The spokesperson said:

“President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world… The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”¹

Calling the contraceptives, which are currently being held in a warehouse in Belgium, “abortifacient” is a barefaced lie. There is no such thing as “abortifacient birth control.” “None of the products held in the warehouse in Belgium [are] abortifacients.”² —None. Zilch. Zero.

An abortifacient is “any substance that is used to terminate a pregnancy.”³ Contraception, on the other hand, “is the act of preventing pregnancy. This can be a device, a medication, a procedure or a behavior.”⁴ The contraceptives “slated for destruction [are] enough to prevent approximately 362,000 unintended pregnancies, 110,000 unsafe abortions and 718 maternal deaths.”⁵

Anti-contraception groups - including Live Action, Students for Life of America, and others - falsely insist that hormonal contraceptives prevent fertilized eggs from implanting inside the uterine wall, and that hormonal contraceptives are therefore abortifacients. This is false for a few reasons.

1. Contragestives are “agents that prevent or interrupt implantation [of a fertilized egg] in the uterus.”⁶ — Not contraceptives. Not abortifacients. Anti-contraception groups aren't even using the correct terminology.

2. A pregnancy does not begin until implantation is complete, approximately day 9 or 10 post-fertilization.⁷⁸ Even if a person uses a contragestive (not a contraceptive) to prevent a pregnancy by preventing implantation, that would not be the same as causing an abortion, because no pregnancy has yet occurred (because no egg has implanted). An abortion is the ending - both spontaneous and induced - of an established pregnancy before fetal viability.⁹ You can't abort a pregnancy that doesn't exist.

3. Hormonsl contraception does not inhibit implantation.

As regular readers will recall (see the Resources and Guides tab at the top of of the page at reprotruth.com), hormonal contraceptives prevent pregnancy by preventing ovulation and fertilization, not by impeding implantation.

As explained in What are hormonal contraceptives and how do they prevent pregnancy?, “By providing high levels of progestin throughout the cycle, hormonal contraceptives (with or without estrogen)” interact with the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian (HPO) axis, and thus interfere with ovulation and fertilization in the following ways.¹⁰

• “Progestins block the changes that estrogen has on cervical mucus mid-cycle. Consequently, the cervical mucus remains thick and impenetrable to the sperm at all times in the cycle, even if an LH surge occurs.”¹¹

• “Progestins keep the uterine contractions moving from the fundus to the cervix, which reduces the number of sperm that enter the upper track.”¹²

• “Progestins thin the tubal epithelium and slow the ciliary action needed for fertilization” to occur,¹³ “decreaseing[] tubal motility by reducing activity of the cilia in the fallopian tube, which prevents the sperm and the egg from meeting.”¹⁴

• Progestins “alter[] luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) secretion, resulting in inhibition of ovulation.”¹⁵

As explained at length in Mechanisms of action: The pill, the implant, the shot, and IUDs, each method of hormonal contraception has a different mechanism of action. For example:

• hormonal intrauterine devices (hormonal IUDs) “work primarily by preventing sperm from fertilizing ova”;¹⁶

• “the primary contraceptive mechanism of action of” the contraceptive injection, Depo-ProveraⓇ, “is inhibition of ovulation”;¹⁷ and

• combined oral contraceptive pills prevent pregnancy by preventing fertilization.¹⁸

As these examples show (read the full article for complete descriptions of each method's mechanism of action), hormonal contraceptives prevent pregnancy by preventing fertilization and ovulation. There is no clinical evidence in humans that hormonal contraception functions in any other way. It does not prevent implantation. It does not cause abortions. There is no such thing as “abortifacient birth control.”

Anti-contraception groups have for decades been attempting to convince Americans that contraceptives cause abortions, despite all evidence to the contrary. Conflating birth control with abortion is a playbook with a lengthy history, as Russell Sorto pointed out in the New York Times back in 2006:

The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn't a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.

It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife." To highlight one type of then-current wickedness, Defoe gives a scene in which a young woman who is about to marry asks a friend for some "recipes." "Why, you little Devil, you would not take Physick to kill the child?" the friend asks as she catches her drift. "No," the young woman answers, "but there may be Things to prevent Conception; an't there?" The friend is scandalized and argues that the two amount to the same thing, but the bride to be dismisses her: "I cannot understand your Niceties; I would not be with Child, that's all; there's no harm in that, I hope." One prime objective of England's Christian warriors in the 1720's was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

[…]

Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

…[T]he anti-birth-control campaign… seems [] to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.

[…]

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. "The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage… Whether it's emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they'd like to see obliterated.”¹⁹

This fundamentalist agenda of “putting sex back into a box” has real policy consequences. As regular readers will remember, the political crusade of pro-natalist prudery against contraception delayed FDA approval of over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptive pills for three years; and this political interference into the scientific process resulted in Plan B’s label including false information for nearly two decades.

“When the drug company that owned Plan B at the time, Barr Pharmaceuticals, sought FDA permission to sell it over-the-counter, the effort faced opposition from anti-abortion forces, according to historical accounts, as well as interviews with people involved. Those forces included a member of the scientific advisory panel reviewing the application,” Dr. Joseph Stanford. Stanford “was a Catholic-influenced Mormon physician who believed human life (and personhood) begins at fertilization.” He “argued that a remote possibility existed that Plan B could prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.” “Despite having no scientific evidence to support that claim, the company agreed to list the post-fertilization mechanism on the packaging as a way of getting the application approved.”

“That seemingly innocuous capitulation has paid dividends for abortion opponents, codifying in official government documents a mechanism of action that would be used to blur the line between contraception and abortion.” The FDA finally changed Plan B's label and updated its information on the medication in 2022, clarifying that “Plan B One-Step does not prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb and does not cause an abortion.” (See: Myth: The ‘Morning After Pill’ is an Abortifacient)

We can also see the real policy consequences that this fundamentalist agenda of “putting sex back into a box” is having today as the Trump administration moves ahead with the destruction of $10 million dollars of contraception. The Trump administration is merely parroting anti-contraception talking points that are based in pro-natalist prudery, not science, to justify its ideologically-driven, politically-calculated decision to needlessly destroy contraception that would otherwise “prevent approximately 362,000 unintended pregnancies, 110,000 unsafe abortions and 718 maternal deaths.”²⁰

There is no truth - none, nada, zilch, zero - to the Trump administration's claim that the $10 million dollars of contraception currently housed in Belgium must be destroyed because it causes abortions. That's a barefaced lie. There is no such thing as “abortifacient birth control.”

1. Nolan, S., Smialek, J., & Wong, E. (2025, September 11). $10 million in contraceptives have been destroyed on orders from Trump Officials. New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/health/usaid-contraceptives-destroyed-trump.html

2. Nolan, S., Smialek, J., & Wong, E. (2025, September 11). $10 million in contraceptives have been destroyed on orders from Trump Officials. New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/health/usaid-contraceptives-destroyed-trump.html

3. Abortifacient. ScienceDirect Topics. (n.d.). https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/abortifacient#:~:text=An%20abortifacient%20is%20any%20substance,commonly%20used%20to%20induce%20abortion

4. Bansode OM, Sarao MS, Cooper DB. Contraception. [Updated 2023 Jul 24]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2023 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK536949

5. Smialek, J., & Nolan , S. (2025, August 7). As Trump Administration Plans to Burn Contraceptives, Europeans Are Alarmed. New York Times . https://archive.ph/2025.09.12-065010/https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/health/usaid-contraceptives-destroyed-trump.html

6. Ramanadhan, S., & Edelman, A. (2025). Combined Hormonal Contraceptives (CHCs). In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 403). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

7. Artal-Mittelmark, Raul. “Stages of Development of the Fetus - Women’s Health Issues.” Merck Manuals Consumer Version, Merck Manuals, 30 Aug. 2023, www.merckmanuals.com/home/women-s-health-issues/normal-pregnancy/stages-of-development-of-the-fetus.

8. Gold, Rachel Benson, and Guttmacher Institute. “The Implications of Defining When a Woman Is Pregnant.” Guttmacher Institute, 30 Aug. 2022, www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2005/05/implications-defining-when-woman-pregnant.

9. WILLIAMS OBSTETRICS ch. 11 at 198 (F. Gary Cunningham, Kenneth J. Leveno, Jodi S. Dashe, Barbara L. Hoffman, Catherine Y. Spong & Brian M. Casey eds., 26th ed. 2022).

10. Nelson, A. L. (2025). Understanding the Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 61). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

11. Nelson, A. L. (2025). Understanding the Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 61). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

12. Nelson, A. L. (2025). Understanding the Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 61). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

13. Nelson, A. L. (2025). Understanding the Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 61). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

14. Roque, C. L., & Burke, A. E. (2025). Progestin-only Pills. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 462). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

15. Roque, C. L., & Burke, A. E. (2025). Progestin-only Pills. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 462). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

16. Economou, N., Mengesha, B., & Schwarz, E. B. (2025). Intrauterine Devices (IUDs). In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 344). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

17. Lawley, M., & Cwiak, C. (2025). Injectable Contraceptives. In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 378). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

18. Ramanadhan, S., & Edelman, A. (2025). Combined Oral Contraceptives (CHCs). In Contraceptive Technology (22nd ed., p. 403). essay, Jones & Bartlett Learning.

19. Shorto, R. (2006, May 7). Contra-contraception. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07contraception.html

20. Smialek, J., & Nolan , S. (2025, August 7). As Trump Administration Plans to Burn Contraceptives, Europeans Are Alarmed. New York Times . https://archive.ph/2025.09.12-065010/https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/health/usaid-contraceptives-destroyed-trump.html