Abortion Marketing Reaches New Low In Targeting Children With American Girl Dolls

Lovering Health Center in Greenland, New Hampshire, recently posted images of American Girl Dolls surrounded by mifepristone and misoprostol boxes, paired with the caption: ‘this American Girl Doll is having a medication abortion!” In case you were unaware, American Girl Dolls are beloved toys geared towards 8–12-year-old girls.

As a sex-trafficking survivor who spent most of my life, including the earliest years of my childhood, in captivity and witnessing forced abortions firsthand, I was appalled at such marketing. As a mother, I was additionally concerned that the clinic bypassed parents in targeting children. And as a women’s health advocate whose life was saved by a New Hampshire pro-life center, I am disgusted that any health ‘professional’ or employee in a position to serve women would downplay the seriousness of dangerous chemical abortion drugs.   

Women deserve so much better. If not for a New Hampshire pro-life organization that offered me protection, free resources, and hope, I would probably be dead. As a young girl, I was sex-trafficked in 33 states for over ten years. During that time, I witnessed other young girls being beaten, sexually exploited, and coerced into unwanted abortions at the hands of pimps. We led horrible lives, made bleaker by the numbing pain of coerced abortions.  

That was before the dawn of completely unregulated chemical abortion drugs.

Back then, pimps had to be crafty about how to procure abortions for victims without getting caught. Thanks to post-COVID rollbacks of safeguards on dangerous chemical abortion drugs, however, now pimps can easily acquire the pills with a click of the finger. Victims, including minors, can now have painful, forced abortions at home rather than under the supervision of doctors who might have the ability to detect signs that they're in trouble.   

Not only that, but the chemical abortion drugs Lovering Health Center seeks to normalize as ‘cute’ and ‘girly’ cause extreme pain and can cause dire complications. In rare cases, they can even cause death. The FDA’s own label on the drugs admits that about one in 25 women end up in the emergency room after use. A recent study additionally found that nearly 11% of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other adverse reactions within 45 days of a mifepristone abortion. To put that in perspective, with over 640,000 reported chemical abortions per year, that suggests that over 70,000 women annually experience serious adverse events due to usage of the drugs.   

These are sobering statistics, made even more concerning by the reality that unregulated chemical abortion has been a boon for pimps and other abusers in evading justice for coercing women and girls into dangerous abortions.   

Yet Lovering Health Center makes light of these statistics by portraying chemical abortion, and abortion in general, as cute, normal and girly. You shouldn’t need to be a trafficking victim to know that abortion is anything but those things. 

Thankfully, such below-the-belt strategies are waking women and girls up to the truth: organizations like Lovering Health Center are not there to help them. They are there to sell a product. A dangerous product that fails to rescue women from whatever problems they are facing. It is no surprise that abortion clinics are rapidly closing across the country when these are the tactics they resort to.

Little girls today should be playing with American Girl Dolls, blissfully unaware of abortion or abortion related propaganda. As a young girl, I did not have that luxury. And it disgusts me that “pro-woman” advocates are using innocent children’s toys to push propaganda about serious drugs that have the potential to physically and emotionally harm women and girls for years to come.