Profiting from Death: The Abortion Pill is Making Original Investors Millions 

Guest post by SFLA Contributing Writer Anna Reynolds

GUEST POST: Abortion activists see the future of abortion as the Chemical Abortion Pill. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and states have started passing stronger pro-life protections, abortion activists have doubled down on their plan to mail abortion pills across state lines. Savvy and predatory abortion supporters are ready to cash in through venture capital funding these expanding abortion businesses.  

Abortion is big business, and abortion-loving investors making big returns on the Chemical Abortion Pill has a precedent.  

The investors who brought the Chemical Abortion Pill to the United States in the 1990s have made hundreds of millions in returns. Students for Life of America has previously reported on how the Chemical Abortion Pill was always about death, and that the creator of the lethal pill knew what he was doing. A new investigative piece from Mother Jones shows how the financial backers of the push to legalize the lethal abortion pill in the United States made, and continue to make, a killing—pun intended. 

Mother Jones, an outlet with a strong pro-abortion bias, far from sympathetic to the pro-lifer perspective, presents the same tired lies about the Chemical Abortion Pill. For example, when describing the early testing of the American version of the Chemical Abortion Pill, the report emphasizes the “emotional and physical relief” mothers experienced of ending a preborn baby’s life through the abortion pill because “[i]t meant they could have an abortion privately and without a vacuum aspiration machine, whose suction ‘feels like you’re getting the life sucked out of you,’ as one early mifepristone recipient described it to the Boston Globe.” 

Quite literally, in a vacuum aspiration abortion a life is “sucked out of you,” but for many mothers, the Chemical Abortion Pill is no less traumatic. Some mothers are left to deliver a dead baby alone or deal with complex, potentially fatal complications without supervision. “DIY” or “self-managed” abortions are not the wonderful “private” experience that abortion activists like to claim. 

On the financial realities of the abortion pill—and the fortunes made by a few men who went all-in—Mother Jones is more forthright.  

As abortion groups worked to bring the Chemical Abortion Pill on the U.S. market with FDA approval, key investors positioned themselves to make an astonishing return. According to Mother Jone, “The pill presented an obvious financial opportunity: the rare sort of drug that they’d never have trouble selling, for a condition that would never cease to exist.” 

While the article keeps coming back to “the desperation of pregnant women as an important problem to solve” and “the social benefits” of the drug, these purported motivations became harder and harder to accept. 

First, there is the absurd claim that ending the life of a preborn baby “helps” her mother and that ending the lives of many preborn babies is a positive “social good.” Next, there is the unavoidable fixation on extravagant wealth generated through the investments, “a golden ticket,” that make the investors’ claims all the more disingenuous. They some “enormous financial potential,” and were not deterred by the loss of millions of human lives. 

Many of the original investors remain anonymous, their money funneled through shell companies into Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of brand-name Mifeprex in the United States. Two original investors have become more public through a prolonged and bitter legal battle for control of the potentially hundred of millions in returns and the future of Danco as abortion activists work to expand use of the Chemical Abortion Pill, a move that will make Danco even more lucrative. 

At the center of the legal battle are Brad Daniel and Greg Hawkins, who have spent millions in legal fees in multiple lawsuits in multiple states. Their business relationship involves a series of shell companies named after racehorses, an alleged rouse involving a fictitious Catholic priest in favor of the abortion pill, and a prolonged fight for control of Danco and the millions it generates through the death of preborn babies. 

Mother Jones reports that court documents show the Hawkins generated a “return on investment of 228.79 percent.” The report continues: “The actual dollar amount has been fastidiously redacted in all the case’s legal filings, but based on the Hawkinses’ disclosures of their total investment in the mifepristone project—between $9 million and $11 million—their earnings would come to between $20.5 million and $25.1 million.” 

Filings from the same legal proceedings indicate “that the average return on investment for everyone who invested in Danco was about 452 percent over 23 years.” Mother Jones notes, “In a 2022 deposition, the CFO of Danco confirmed that ‘the Project has ultimately become quite successful,’ and investments have ‘been extremely profitable.’” 

As the interested parties continue to squabble about control of the company and the profits to come, a spokesperson for Mrs. Hawkins said the legal fight “has been an incredibly challenging ordeal for Mrs. Hawkins. Her focus has always been on preserving women’s right to safe, reproductive health care. The battle over corporate governance has threatened women’s ability to receive the full benefit of this impactful medicine.” 

With the tens of millions of dollars on the line and the untold profits in a world with abortion activists trying to expand the Chemical Abortion Pill, it’s becoming ever more difficult to believe that the people who gave us legal abortion want to make the lives of mothers better. In the case of the Chemical Abortion Pill, it’s clear that a few people want to keep making a killing by any means necessary.