When Abortion Pills Become the Weapons of Abusers

Jona Affholder was around eight weeks pregnant, and it was a little after 4 a.m., when she said she woke up to find her boyfriend on top of her. For a split second, she thought he was hugging her. Then, she told me, she realized he was pinning her down, forcing his fingers into her mouth: “I truly thought he was going to kill me.”

After a two-minute struggle, Affholder had a thought: If her boyfriend wanted to kill her, she’d already be unconscious. She remembers realizing that he was smashing a crushed powder inside her bottom lip and onto her gums. “I knew, after that point, that it was an abortion medication,” she said.

It was December 18, 2024, and the then-27-year-old Affholder, from Toledo, Ohio, had been dating 32-year-old Dr. Hassan-James Abbas—a local surgeon—for around three months. In the beginning, she had been excited about the relationship, and hoped it might turn serious. “All I’d ever seen from him was just like a completely normal person who led with kindness,” Affholder said. “He seemed very genuine.”

But when, a week before the alleged assault, she told Abbas she was pregnant—and that she wanted to keep the baby—she saw another side of him. She said he became “aggressive,” “angry,” and “nasty,” insisting that the pregnancy would bring shame on his family, and demanding she have an abortion. He also admitted that he had an estranged wife, to whom he was still legally married.

Affholder was horrified. “I just didn’t want anything to do with him moving forward,” she said. She told him their relationship was over and that she would raise their baby without him.

Days later, Affholder said, Abbas reached out to her and apologized profusely. “He was crying, explaining that he was so sorry for the things that he said and that he did not want me to have an abortion and that we would figure it out,” she said. “He knew exactly what he needed to say or do to get me to come back to him.”

Affholder decided to give him a second chance, and Abbas spent the week being “very attentive,” making sure she was eating and drinking enough. For the first time in their relationship, she recalls, he began making her teas and buying her hot chocolates.

“I wasn’t really finishing the beverages,” she said. “I’m not a big tea person, so I sipped on it for a little bit, and then I dumped the rest down the drain.”

In hindsight, Affholder now believes that Abbas had laced the drinks with drugs that can induce miscarriage—otherwise known as abortifacients—and that he resorted to brute force only when these attempted poisonings failed.