CHARLESTON, West Virginia (LifeSiteNews) – The West Virginia House Committee on Health and Human Resources advanced legislation to allow taxpayer dollars for pregnancy support to also finance abortion pill reversal (APR), a technique to help save the babies of women who regret initiating chemical abortions.

Senate Bill 805 would amend the West Virginia Mothers and Babies Pregnancy Support Program, which provides funding to life-affirming “pregnancy help organizations” across the state, to also cover “Expenditures associated with the abortion pill reversal,” defined in the law as the “use of progesterone by a licensed health care provider for the purposes of counteracting the effects of ingested mifepristone as part of a chemical abortion.”

The bill already passed the Senate on March 4 in a 31-1 vote, with two senators absent.

Live Action noted that the program dispensed $3 million to pregnancy centers last year and will spend $4 million in the 2027 fiscal year.

“So we’re not taking away anything that’s currently available under our law,” said Republican state Sen. Brian Helton, SB 805’s Senate sponsor. “What we are doing is adding another choice to women and in my opinion giving a lot better medical care throughout this process.”

Pro-life OB/GYN Dr. William Lile has explained that APR is based on principles that are well understood from progesterone’s common, FDA-approved use in a variety of other pregnancy-related situations. According to the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN), “initial studies of APR have shown it has a 64%-68% success rate.” Heartbeat International also publishes firsthand testimonials from women who have benefited from the technique.

Last summer, the academic journal Scientific Reports published a study by Franciscan University of Steubenville neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Sammut that found “progesterone, administered shortly after mifepristone, reversed the effects of mifepristone (i.e., reversed the abortion) with living fetuses present at the end of gestation in 81 percent of cases,” after months of being challenged and rejected by other publications.

“All major studies show that using progesterone to counteract a chemical abortion (Abortion Pill Reversal) can be effective since it’s the very same hormone a woman’s body produces to sustain her pregnancy,” Heartbeat International says. “One study even shows an effective rate of 80 percent. Progesterone has been safely used with pregnant women and their babies since the 1950s. To date, statistics show more than 4,500 women have had successful abortion pill reversals and that number grows higher each day.”

However, despite labeling itself “pro-choice,” the abortion movement is notoriously hostile to any and all types of alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers as “deceptive” to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that are less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.