When I first saw Massachusetts’ abortion total for 2024, I assumed there was a mistake. Based on historical data, it simply wasn’t plausible. In 2023, a reported 20,008 abortions took place in Massachusetts. For 2024, Guttmacher put the state total at 20,990—and their estimates are almost always too high. In fact, among the 23 states where abortion remains legal and 2024 abortion totals have already been reported, the Guttmacher estimate was higher than reported 23 times. That’s 100%. Their overall abortion estimate for those 23 states was inflated by 27%. But all that changed last week with the publication of the 2024 Massachusetts Induced Termination of Pregnancy Report. Guttmacher’s estimate, it turns out, was 81% too low. The actual 2024 abortion total for Massachusetts was 49,450. That’s more than twice what it was in 2023 and three times what it was in 2020.

In 2020, there were roughly 16,000 abortions in Massachusetts against 66,000 live births. In 2023, it was 20,000 abortions versus 67,000 live births. The next year, 2024, there were 49,000 abortions and 68,000 live births—which prompts the question: What changed between 2023 and 2024 to account for such a drastic increase in abortion? That would be the onslaught of telehealth abortion, which is the practice of sending out abortion pills through the mail. Green-lighted during our abysmal Covid response, telehealth abortion seems to be rearing its ugly head wherever I look. Two weeks ago I reported that, thanks to this new phenomenon, England now aborts 32% of its unborn populace. To that, Massachusetts said, “hold my beer.” The percentage of pregnancies aborted in Massachusetts went from 20% in 2020 to 42% in 2024, at least in theory. The reality is more complicated and troubling. 

Among the 49,450 abortions Massachusetts reported in 2024, 62% were performed via telehealth. But state residents accounted for “only” 21,407 total abortions. That means close to 28,000 “Massachusetts” abortions were performed on out-of-state (OOS) residents. How many of those were performed via telehealth? We don’t know yet. Maybe all of them. There is more demographic data available for 2023, when there were a reported 5,744 telehealth abortions in Massachusetts. Seventy five percent were performed out of state—bringing Massachusetts listed 2023 abortion total up to 24,355. Among 2023 abortions that took place in person, the percentages were reversed. Only 25% were performed on out-of-state residents. In 2022, there were no telehealth abortions reported in Massachusetts and just 5% of abortions were performed on out-of-state residents. Which is to say, in the course of two years, Massachusetts has transformed itself into the nation’s leading exporter of abortion.

New Mexico and Kansas are abortion destinations. Women travel to them from other states to have abortions because, in the case of New Mexico, abortion is illegal in Texas, or in the case of Kansas, there are few other late-term options available. Out-of-state residents account for more than 60% of abortions in New Mexico and roughly 70% in Kansas. Massachusetts, it seems, has become an abortion distributor—a category that has never existed before. Historically, there have been two ways to tally state abortion totals. There is the resident total and the occurrence total. The resident total is the number of abortions procured by residents of a particular state, no matter where the abortion takes place. The occurrence total is the number of abortions that occurred within the geographical bounds of a particular state and includes abortions performed on out-of-state residents. But now Massachusetts has introduced a third category. That is, abortions that are provided by one state but performed in a different state on women who live in a different state. And yet those abortions still show up on Massachusetts’ ledger. At the very least, this will require a change to the way we record and report abortions. 

One of the primary ways Abort73 has reported state abortion data over the years is by listing the average number of children a state aborts on any given day. It’s the total number of abortions that occurred within a given state, in a given year, divided by 365. As you can see, this metric no longer works for Massachusetts. If 75% of its 2024 telehealth abortions took place out-of-state, as they did in 2023, that would mean that almost half of Massachusetts abortions took place in another state. It also throws a wrench into the model I use to estimate our nationwide abortion total each year. This estimate is necessary, you’ll remember, because California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have not reported state abortion totals for decades. And now Michigan and Washington are following suit. 

Prior to the publication of Massachusetts abortion data for 2024, 36 states had already published their 2024 totals. According to Guttmacher, those 36 states account for 36% of America’s abortion total. If that’s true, we can estimate that approximately 801,000 U.S. abortions occurred in 2024. But if I add Massachusetts into the equation, the new estimated nationwide total jumps all the way to 890,000 abortions. I don’t know what to do with that. According to Guttmacher’s 2024 estimates, Massachusetts makes up 2% of America’s abortion total. If that were actually the case, the nationwide abortion total for 2024 would be 2.5 million. Massachusetts is such an outlier that it renders the model almost useless. If we knew the number of abortion pills that Massachusetts sent out of state, we could deduct that from their total. But we don’t. And would those abortions show up on the ledgers of the states in which they occured? I don’t see why they would, unless Massachusetts is notifying those state of their arrival, which seems unlikely. Then there’s the fact that telehealth abortions are measured by the number of pills that are sent out, not by the number of abortions that occur. There is, apparently, no follow up.

In 2023, Planned Parenthood killed more babies in Massachusetts than anyone else. Their Boston abortion clinic ended the lives of 4,811 tiny human beings. Planned Parenthood of Western Massachusetts added 1,875 more, and Planned Parenthood of Central Massachusetts tallied another 1,675. That’s 8,361 abortions amongst the state’s three Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, or 34% of the state’s 2023 abortion total. In 2024, those same three Planned Parenthoods managed to increase total abortions, as they always seem to do, but thanks to telehealth, their market share was cut in half. It fell to 17% of total abortions, which Planned Parenthood cannot be happy about. I suppose it’s possible that this billion-dollar non-profit is so devoted to the nobility of killing children in the womb that they can celebrate it no matter who gets paid for its execution. But I suspect their interests are more pecuniary than that. Medical personnel who sell their souls to the devil tend to want as much financial compensation as they can get.

Who is getting paid for the telehealth abortions that are taking over the industry? That’s a question no one seems able to answer. Ostensibility, it is the drug manufacturers. In America, there are only two. That would be Danco Laboratories, the company that first brought medical abortion to the U.S. on behalf of the aptly-named Population Council and GenBioPro, a recent upstart offering a generic alternative. Both entities manufacture a single product which has but a single application—the killing of human embryos and fetuses. The drug’s name: mifepristone. Danco Laboraties operates anonymously out of a P.O. Box in New York City. GenBioPro hails from that other bastion of moral virtue: Las Vegas. 

My efforts to learn more about these rather opaque entities led me to a 2023 L.A. Times article headlined, “Why you’ve never heard of the company behind the abortion pill.” Here are some of the takeaways. Danco Labs “has fewer than 20 employees,” is not listed on any public exchanges, and “doesn’t make any of its sales figures public.” Nor does it share the name of its CEO, its board members, or its investors. Danco Labs was expressly formed to distribute the abortion pill on behalf of The Population Council, which secured the U.S. rights in 1994. FDA approval for mifepristone was secured through a secret off-site meeting, the public record of which has been largely redacted. What is the reason for this concerted lack of disclosure? According to the article, which reads like something generated by AI, “All of the secrecy around Danco exists because of fear about what antiabortion activists might do.” It’s our fault, you see, though there is another explanation to consider. It’s not as if Planned Parenthood is hiding out in the shadows. 

Mother Jones also published an article about Danco Labs in 2023. Its version was titled “The Abortion Pill’s Secret Money Men.” It’s subtitle: “The untold story of the private equity investors behind Mifeprex—and their escalating legal battle to cash in post-Dobbs.” There’s more in that title than in the whole of the L.A. Times piece, and you can already feel the tension. Namely, Mother Jones’ love for abortion versus its contempt for capitalism. “Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs,” their website proudly proclaims. To Mother Jones’ credit, their exposé on the decades of infighting and deception that have marked the development and distribution of the abortion pill is not a flattering one. It’s not a good look for the men who believed in both “the social benefits of mifepristone, and in the enormous financial potential.” Here’s an excerpt:

Over the last two decades, mifepristone’s dramatic origin story has made its way into books and the pages of the New York Times. But the tale of who funded this effort to legally bring it to women across the country, and what benefits the funders might reap from their investments, has been mostly kept quiet… The small group of investors who backed the Population Council’s drive to manufacture and distribute the drug since its earliest days have made a lot of money on the mifepristone business—tens of millions of dollars, according to court filings. Their windfall has come through a byzantine corporate structure set up in the 1990s by a private equity fund, now called MedApproach Holdings, to allow investors to pour money into Danco Labs—until 2019 the only US retailer of mifepristone—without disclosing their identities. As states have imposed ever-stricter limits on abortion access, their investments have generated hefty returns… The potential is so promising that two of the primary investors (Joseph Pike & Brad Daniel) have engaged in a bitter court battle to take control of the investment, and Danco itself.

As Danco’s investors fight amongst themselves, their competition is less averse to the public spotlight. GenBioPro’s CEO, Evan Masingill, looks more like a frat boy than a scientist, but was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most-influential people for health in 2025 (along with health care luminaries like Seth Rogen, Colin Farrell, and Dwayne Wayde). When I went to the GenBioPro website to see about ordering abortion pills online, I found that I couldn’t. Not directly, at least. There’s a login portal for prescribers and pharmacies but patients are told they need a prescription first. And that prescription, apparently, can be obtained through the magic of “telemedicine.” To that end, GenBioPro links to Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, Abortion Care Network, Abortion Clinics Online, I Need an A, and AbortionFinder.org. So perhaps Planned Parenthood is getting a cut of the telehealth pie in Massachusetts, but the competition has certainly become more cut throat. When you can sell abortions without a facility, without an abortionist, and without having to worry about disposal or liability, the barriers to entry become a whole lot more manageable. And the profit margins become a whole lot more attractive—which may explain why it isn’t feminist women we see leading this revolution. It’s business men. 

This past weekend while selling T-shirts at a local food festival, I found myself right next to a booth that was far more vocal in calling out to passers by than I am (despite my surname). They announced themselves as a woman-owned business hundreds of times over the course of the afternoon—causing me to wonder what kind of chaos I could unleash by calling upon the crowd to come support a man-owned business. Would my neighbors have laughed or raged? And how long would the event organizers allow such subversive behavior to continue? In all seriousness, I would be curious to hear my neighbors’ response this question: Why is it better to buy from a woman-owned business? Because that is the implication of their ongoing proclamations.

Polite society doesn’t require anyone to explain why it’s morally superior to transact with a woman-owned business or a black-owned business. It’s just something we’ve been conditioned to believe. It goes without saying, but if someone did have to answer for it, I suspect the most mainstream explanation would go something like this. Women-owned businesses or black-owned businesses aren’t necessarily better than those operated by white men. They just face more obstacles to success. But that argument has a problem. Because if it were still the case that being a woman or being black was a detriment to success, wouldn’t business owners who check those boxes try to hide their identity instead of announcing it to the world? 

The reason my festival neighbors so relentlessly trumpeted their credentials as a woman-owned business is because they were confident that such knowledge would make people more likely to buy from them, not less. And they’re probably right. But here’s the thing. If there is something about you as a business owner that has nothing to do with your product or service but makes people more likely to buy from you, that’s called a competitive advantage—not a disadvantage. It’s the same thing we see in both education and hiring. Characteristics that are advertised as disadvantages turn out to be the opposite. And by suggesting that a certain sex or race deserves special consideration, you wind up reinforcing the very notions you’re supposed to be combatting.

I bring this up to highlight the widespread cultural assumption that businesses owned by women are more virtuous than businesses owned by men. This has ramifications for abortion because the abortion business is likewise cloaked in nobility for its perceived connection to women. To maintain their carefully-curated public persona as a woman-led organization, Planned Parenthood hasn’t been helmed by a man since 1978 and that man (Alan Guttmacher) has been scrubbed from their website’s history page—probably because he is the president who both got Planned Parenthood into the abortion business (against the explicit wishes of the woman who founded it) and authorized its distribution of the birth control pill. I would suggest that the reason the public hears so little about Danco Labs or GenBioPro owes to much the same thing. It’s not because of any supposed threat of violence. It’s because their principles are men (probably white men) who see “the desperation of pregnant women” as their “golden ticket.” That’s how Mother Jones put it. 

If you want to assign primary credit or blame for legal abortion in America, you can lay it at the feet of four white men. Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington played their part, but my Mount Rushmore of abortion includes Alan Guttmacher, Lawrence Lader, Harry Blackmun, and Bernard Nathanson—three of whom had a clear profit motive. Lawrence Lader co-founded NARAL. He also wrote the book on abortion. That book became a blueprint of sorts for Justice Harry Blackmun whose infamous ruling in Roe v. Wade cited Lader more than a half dozen times. Bernard Nathanson showed that abortion-on-demand could efficiently work at scale. His NYC abortion clinic operated almost around the clock, killing roughly 100 babies per day in the run up to Roe. Were these men unscrupulous monsters? They didn’t think so. They were simply doing what needed to be done. The means hardly mattered. For Lader, who was instrumental in bringing the abortion pill to America, those means included traveling to London in 1992 with a pregnant West Coast anarchist (this according to Boston's GBH) to obtain mifepristone, but convincing her not to take it until returning to the states—knowing full well the pills would be confiscated by customs officials. He got the publicity he wanted—and a Supreme Court case—while also sneaking a second set of pills into the U.S. He didn’t give those pills to his abortion mule, of course. He sent her for a surgical procedure and reverse engineered those pills instead. His team—“which included a doctor who lived 1,000 miles away and asked to go by Dr. X; a Columbia University chemist working for free; and two assistants”—told anyone who asked that they “were working on a new treatment for cancer.”

When Larry Lader died in 2006, the L.A. Times called him a “standout” for being “a man in a feminist’s world.” But you could just as easily argue that the women he brought in to sell abortion were feminists in a man’s world. Why do I say that? Because abortion-on-demand aligns quite well with the interests of men who want cheap and easy sex. The availability of birth control and abortion makes it much easier for these men to get the sex they want without being on the hook for the women they impregnate or the children they conceive. Nobody benefits more from women’s “liberation” than libertine men. “Free love,” the fictitious Inspector Thursday observed, “[is] the most expensive kind there is.” At least for women.

I’ll grant that women have never had more doors open to them than they do right now. I would simply point out that women have also never been more miserable. Depression in American women has risen to unprecedented heights and is twice as common as depression in men. The CDC reports that roughly one-quarter of American women over 40 take anti-depressants. PBS calls it “the women’s health issue no one is talking about.” And lest anyone try to pin the blame for this on the fall of Roe or the rise of Donald Trump, sorry, this article is from 2016. Between 2020 and 2022, the increase in trajectory of antidepressant use among teen girls ages 12 to 17 increased by 130%, according to the American Psychological Association. Again, this is pre-Dobbs. If abortion has made life better for women in America, someone forgot to tell the women. Meanwhile, venture-capitalist men are cashing in. For them, and I’m quoting Mother Jones again, “[the abortion pill] was another opportunity to make some real money—and do some good along the way.”

The opportunity to make some real money is a consideration you’ll never hear from those on this side of the abortion debate. Even from those whose opposition to abortion has earned them a fair measure of public notoriety and personal wealth. Live Action now has three executives who make a quarter million dollars or more, but I can say with near certainty that Lila Rose didn’t go into this work to get rich. She simply proved so adept at exposing the depravity of Planned Parenthood that the donations started pouring in. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s current CEO makes a reported $900,000 for a simple willingness to keep abortion front and center. Her predecessor, Leanna Wen—an actual medical doctor—was removed in less than a year for trying to shift Planned Parenthood’s focus away from abortion. Its board, according to Wen, decided instead to “double down on abortion rights advocacy.” The reason nobody goes into the anti-abortion business to make money is because it isn’t a business at all. Opposing abortion doesn’t make money; it consumes money. And while both sides claim the moral high ground, only one side is growing rich along the way. 

I still don’t know who is cashing in on the tens of thousands of telehealth abortions that are now being initiated annually in Massachusetts. Who are the middlemen in The Bay State that are connecting out-of-state drug companies with out-of-state mothers who then self-administer out-of-state abortions? The only real connection I could find between mifepristone and Massachusetts is the late Lawrence Lader himself. Lader earned his B.A. from Harvard, and The Lawrence Lader Papers are housed at Smith College—a women’s college in Northampton, MA (which I assume to be far superior to any college that would enroll a man). Whoever these new abortion profiteers are, my hope is that their financial ambitions will set them on a collision course with each other, which we’re already seeing in part. Could it be that the democratization of abortion—which gives more people more access to its filthy lucre—will wind up destroying the industry from the inside out? For a business built on decades of lies and subterfuge, what a fitting end that would be.