Criminalization of abortion medication
27 August 2024
Yes, the Republican Party, emulating Donald Trump, really seems to hate women and girls since they keep criminalizing their personal activities even though they are “none of their damn business”.
This essay is excerpted from Jessica Valenti’s blog, Abortion Every Day:
Earlier this year Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law SB 276, a first-of-its-kind legislation classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. The drugs, commonly used to perform medication abortions, are responsible for 63% of abortions in the US. As a result of this new law, mere possession of mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription in Louisiana can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”
We know what happens now: The outcome of this new layer of criminalization is entirely foreseeable. By putting the pills on a drug registry with special access rules, providers are no longer able to easily prescribe the pills and the ability of OB/GYNs to nimbly provide needed—and even emergency—health care if a woman is miscarrying is chilled. In Louisiana’s telling, mife and miso are the new heroin and medication abortion care puts pregnant people’s lives in jeopardy, not their own dangerous law. The lack of situational awareness around the law would be comical if the inevitable devastation of its effects wasn’t so horrifying.
This is true even for people who are not using the drugs to end their pregnancies, but for the myriad other health issues the drugs treat—from softening the cervix for an endometrial biopsy to the insertion of IUDs. But the massive burden SB 276 places on pregnant people—particularly those seeking to self-manage their own abortions—is disastrous. By reclassifying a safe, effective, regulated drug used for a broad range of healthcare purposes into a dangerous controlled substance whose distribution and use can be entered and tracked in a state database, Louisiana, as one local health care provider noted, would “effectively be creating a database of every woman who is prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, regardless of the reason, truly monitoring women and their pregnancies. That should be unimaginable in America.”
Your responsibility is to do something about this, starting with voting to protect the rights and health of women and girls.
Some of my related essays:
How politics affects the practice of medicine, 14 August 2024
Support Vice President Harris and Democrats to improve healthcare, 12 August 2024
The danger of living in states with Trump's abortion bans, 30 July 2024
Republican states are dangerous for women and girls, 29 May 2024
“Of course they want us dead”, 10 January 2024
How red states are torturing pregnant women, 25 October 2023
Gift giving to support reproductive rights, 24 December 2023
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