Misoprostol alone and Jérôme Lejeune: two visions of man face to face

Verified Raw Facts

According to data reported by Le Salon Beige, abortions using misoprostol alone reached 300,000 cases in the United States in 2025. This practice differs from the usual two-drug protocol (mifepristone + misoprostol): when administered alone, the prostaglandin triggers labor. The children are born alive, before viability, and die outside the womb.

On June 22, 2026, Leo XIV received in audience the members of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the Venerable Professor. He praised "the man who was both a pioneer of modern genetics, a physician devoted to the most vulnerable, and a fervent defender of life." He urged: "Be like him, witnesses."

Analysis of Underlying Issues

Misoprostol alone represents a qualitative, not just quantitative, evolution of chemical abortion. Telemedicine has eliminated the mandatory consultation with a doctor and turned the act into a remote transaction. The child is no longer "removed": they are "expelled" alive, outside any medical emergency context.

This solitude of the act is total. No medical presence. No third party. No place. Death occurs at home, alone, by mail. Whatever moral position one adopts, this reality deserves to be named clearly: what the procedure describes is not a medical act. It is the delivery of a child condemned to die alone.

Jérôme Lejeune (1926–1994) is the exact counter-model. The discoverer in 1959 of the chromosomal cause of Down syndrome, he refused to use this discovery to justify the elimination of people with trisomy. He paid for this refusal with his scientific career. He did not receive the Nobel Prize he might have expected. Much later, he was granted the title of Venerable.

Philosophical Perspective

The question posed by misoprostol alone is not medical. It is anthropological: what is a human body? Is it a set of biological functions that can be freely disposed of according to one's own purposes? Or is it the expression of a person who cannot be reduced to measurable characteristics?

Realist philosophy, in the Thomist tradition, answers firmly: the soul informs the body; the body is not an accessory. The human person begins to exist from fertilization, not at a threshold of "viability" defined by the medical technology of the moment.

Lejeune had formulated this observation in scientific terms: "Genetics has established that, from fertilization, a new and distinct human being begins its existence." This was not a believer's opinion. It was an empirical statement. That science is now being used to eliminate what it has helped to better understand is a contradiction that scientists themselves should name.

Food for Thought for the Reader