Woman Pleads Guilty to Selling Abortion Drugs Used to Force Women to Have Abortions

State   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Mar 6, 2020   |   6:55PM   |   New York City, NY

A New York City woman pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to illegally selling abortion drugs that may have been used in an attempted forced abortion.

WSAU reports Ursula Wing, 42, allegedly sold abortion drugs illegally through an online jewelry website. Now, she could face up to five years in prison.

One of the people who allegedly purchased the drugs from her, Jeffrey S. Smith, 33, of Grand Rapids, Wisconsin, also is facing charges for allegedly trying to force his girlfriend to abort her unborn baby, the report states. Court documents indicate Smith tried to order the drugs from Wing twice.

Police said Wing bought the abortion drugs from India with fraudulent paperwork and then sold them online. When police raided her apartment, they said the found more than 900 packages of abortion drugs. It is not clear from reports how many she may have sold.

According to the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Graber told a federal judge Thursday that Wing used an online jewelry blog as a front for her illegal abortion business.

He said she required customers to pay for the abortion drugs with credit cards, and she would label the purchases as jewelry. According to Graber’s testimony, she imported the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol from India and then sold them for $85 online.

“The drugs are considered poisons by the U.S. Postal Service, and Wing wasn’t authorized to send poisons through the mail,” the report states.

Here’s more from the report:

On Thursday, Wing told [federal District Judge James] Peterson she distributed medications online without a license. The medications were to be used to induce abortions and assist women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies at a lower cost and with more privacy than associated with conventional medical care, she said.

Before being indicted, Wing gave an interview to Mother Jones News in which she said she began her business to finance a costly child custody battle and became a political activist in order to expand access to abortion. She said she was glad to help undermine abortion law and provide these pills to the public. She also encouraged “copy cats” as not enough people were doing what she was doing, according to the Mother Jones News story.

The abortion drugs that Wing allegedly sold are dangerous and can be deadly to mothers as well as their unborn babies. At least 24 women have died along with their unborn babies after taking the drugs, and thousands more have been injured. Even a Planned Parenthood study found that at least one woman is seriously injured from the abortion drugs daily.

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Despite myriad concerns, there is a concentrated push by abortion activists to expand access to the deadly drugs. Some pro-abortion news outlets and women’s magazines are openly promoting websites that sell the dangerous abortion drugs illegally.

Unregulated sales of abortion drugs can be dangerous in other ways as well. Forced abortions do occur, often at the hands of abusive partners, and the drugs already have been linked to several such abuses.

Jeffrey S. Smith, 32, of Wisconsin Rapids, is accused of attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend’s unborn baby in 2018 using the abortion drugs he bought from Wing, according to a criminal complaint. Smith allegedly slipped the drugs into his ex-girlfriend’s water bottle when she was not looking, authorities said.

He is charged with attempted first-degree intentional homicide of an unborn child and felony delivery of prescription drugs, WAOW News reports.

Smith is scheduled to stand trial later this year.

LifeNews has reported several similar cases of attempted forced abortions in the past few years. In late 2017, a Virginia doctor also spiked his pregnant girlfriend’s drink with an abortion drug, killing their unborn baby. In 2018, Dr. Sikander Imran was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to fetal homicide. In 2014, a Florida man also was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he allegedly tricked his pregnant girlfriend into taking abortion drugs that killed their unborn baby.

Many pro-life advocates are concerned that these abuses could grow worse if abortion activists succeed in forcing pharmacies to dispense abortion drugs or allowing them to be distributed by mail-order.