When she found out she was pregnant in late December 2023, Mackenna Greene wasn’t sure what to do.
In early January, she ordered an abortion pill online. She said she took the white pill the evening of Jan. 4 — and then quickly regretted it.
“Honestly, the second that I found out that I was pregnant and was even considering abortion, I was unsure. I took that pill not being 100% confident in the decision from Day One,” Greene, 26, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, told the Register. “So the guilt and the, I guess, unsurety of what I was doing really set in after taking that pill. It continued to fester, I guess.”
The next day she did a Google search to try to find out if the abortion pill can be reversed.
“I was very desperate to get a way out of it,” Greene said.
She got in touch with Chelsea Mynyk, a pro-life nurse practitioner, who immediately put her on a regimen of progesterone, a hormone that health-care providers sometimes use to prevent miscarriage during pregnancy. Greene said she took the first progesterone pill about 24 hours after the abortion pill and stayed on progesterone for several weeks after that.
The progesterone pills, which Greene described as yellowish, worked. In August, Greene gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
Greene and Mynyk spoke to the Register on Thursday, in an online interview arranged and attended by representatives of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that takes on religious-liberty cases. The organization is representing Mynyk in a federal lawsuit challenging a Colorado state law that threatens health-care workers with disciplinary action if they offer abortion-pill reversal.
Mynyk told the Register the law is wrong.
“I say that Colorado should not be able to silence us as medical professionals, or preventing us from saving lives. That is our job. That is our call: to help save lives,” Mynyk said.
“And here we’re saving not only Mackenna’s life, but also her baby’s life. And that’s the role as a health professional,” she said. “So we’re just hopeful that we can make sure other professionals and other moms like Mackenna can have this option to choose to save their baby’s life.”
How It Works
Mynyk, a practicing Christian who operates Castle Rock Women’s Health about 30 miles south of Denver, is a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging a Colorado state law that threatens disciplinary action against medical personnel who participate in abortion-pill reversal.
It’s an increasingly contentious topic, in part because most abortions in the United States now take place not in an abortion facility but through chemicals taken orally at home.
A chemical abortion usually requires two pills. The first pill, mifepristone, blocks the naturally occurring hormone progesterone; without it, the pregnancy can’t develop, in most cases killing the unborn baby. The second pill, misoprostol, causes the woman’s body to expel the baby’s remains.
Some pro-life doctors say that, in some cases, a chemical abortion can be reversed, if a woman who has taken mifepristone takes a progesterone dose quickly enough to block the effects of mifepristone. They claim this method succeeds more often than it fails.
But critics say there isn’t enough evidence that it works and that it’s not a good idea for the woman. (Both sides cite studies.)
In recent years, state authorities in abortion-friendly states have put heat on pro-life health-care practitioners who offer abortion-pill reversal, including, as the Register reported last month, in New York, New Jersey, California, Washington and Vermont.
One of those abortion-friendly states is Colorado, which was the first state to legalize abortion, in 1967, almost six years before Roe v. Wade. Abortion is unrestricted in Colorado. The state’s Reproductive Health Equity Act — which Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed into law in April 2022 — declares abortion to be a “fundamental right” and sets no limits on it.
Last year, the state went a step further, enacting a statute in April 2023 that defines an attempt to reverse a chemical abortion as “unprofessional conduct” that may be “subject to discipline” unless the state boards that regulate doctors, nurses and pharmacists approve rules declaring it “a generally accepted standard of practice.”
Becket law group almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit against the state on behalf of Bella Health and Wellness, an independent Catholic medical center with three locations in Colorado that offers what it calls “life-affirming” health care, including abortion-pill reversal. The organization has the blessing of Archbishop Samuel Aquila, who leads the Archdiocese of Denver; it appears in the “Official Catholic Directory” as a Catholic organization but is run independently of the archdiocese, according to the complaint.
The medical center’s complaint claims the state law violates the First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and free speech of the health center, its two nurse-practitioner co-founders, and an obstetrician-gynecologist who works there, along with the rights of women seeking abortion reversals, under the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In October 2023, a federal judge in U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction barring the state of Colorado from enforcing the law, saying the statute “runs afoul” of religious-freedom protections in the First Amendment. The case is pending.
In March 2024, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a motion on behalf of Mynyk asking a judge if she could intervene in the Bella Health and Wellness lawsuit as a plaintiff, saying that the Colorado Board of Nursing was investigating her for abortion-pill reversal. A judge allowed her to join as a plaintiff in April.
Opposition to Abortion Reversal
Among the documents Becket lawyers for Bella Health and Wellness have filed in the case is a transcript of excerpts from a press conference that state legislators who oppose abortion-pill reversal participated in on March 3, 2023, in support of the bill seeking to end the practice.
Colorado state Sen. Janice Marchman, a Democrat who represents Boulder County and Larimer County, said the bill would “crack down on what we know as anti-abortion centers, or crisis-pregnancy centers, which use manipulation and deception to influence people seeking reproductive health care.”
“Anti-abortion centers represent the on-the-ground presence of the national anti-abortion movement, offering dangerous, sometimes life-threatening medical procedures like so-called abortion-pill reversals,” Marchman said, according to the transcript.
Pro-lifers often claim that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers target poor women in Black and Latino neighborhoods. But another sponsor of the bill, state Rep. Elisabeth Epps, turned that argument on its head, claiming that pro-life pregnancy centers “market to marginalized Coloradans,” including Blacks, Indigenous and immigrants, who she said “already have a harder time accessing health-care services” and suffer from what she called “systemic inequities in access to protected health care,” including abortion.
“What’s more, these anti-abortion centers, they push these — you’ve heard of these abortion-reversal pills. They push them. And after a patient, a person who has taken real medication,” said Epps, referring to the first abortion pill.
“This practice is not only dangerous and unregulated, but evidence shows that these pills cannot even reverse an abortion. But what they do is impact the pregnant person’s body and harm us,” said Epps, a Democrat who represents several neighborhoods in Denver, according to the transcript. “And so that’s why I am honored to introduce with my colleagues a bill that prohibits the use of deceptive advertising by these centers and that limits what they market, what they want us to believe is an abortion-reversal pill.”
The Register contacted Marchman and Epps for comment, but did not hear back prior to publication.
Second Thoughts
Greene told the Register the state law discouraging abortion reversal fails to take into account second-thoughts cases like hers.
“The reason for, you know, originally wanting an abortion, to sum it up in one word, I would say that would be fear: fear of failing my 2 1/2-year-old that I had, dealing with those emotions; fear of failing professionally, financially — just afraid of so much of the unknown, considering it was an unplanned pregnancy,” Green said.
“So there were many factors that were all screaming at me that this was the right decision to take. And in short, taking the first pill of that chemical abortion protocol, it was my get-out-of-jail-free card. It was that — taking that first pill was the easy way out of a very difficult situation for me. So I took that easy route, I guess,” Greene said.
She described the process as backwards.
“They will ship the chemical abortion kit to you. You just do a small questionnaire online. It is very unfortunate that it is easier to obtain the chemical-abortion protocol than it is to reverse those effects when you’re trying to support a healthy pregnancy,” Greene said.
She said she finds the Colorado state law unreasonable, given that progesterone is routinely used outside the context of a chemical abortion to prevent a miscarriage for women who want to give birth.
“It’s completely unfair that Colorado law currently allows progesterone, or lifesaving care for an unborn baby, to one type of group of women, but is prohibiting it from women in my circumstance and scenario,” Greene said.
While critics of abortion-pill reversal say it’s a bad idea, Greene says her case shows otherwise.
“I feel great, my baby is great, she’s healthy, and I absolutely attribute that to the care that I received from Chelsea and the progesterone, the abortion-pill-reversal treatment that I received,” Greene said. “I wouldn’t have my daughter here today without Chelsea and that progesterone treatment. I firmly believe that.”