Louisiana may soon become the first state in the country to pass a bill adding two common abortion pills to the state’s list of controlled dangerous substances, leading individuals who are caught with the drugs and lack authorization to potentially face years in prison.
Like the rest of the US deep south, Louisiana already bans almost all abortions. But recently, when a house committee in the Republican-controlled legislature debated a bill to ban people from performing abortions on people without their consent, lawmakers added an amendment to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, as Schedule IV drugs.
Under that amendment, a woman who obtains the drugs “for her own consumption” would not face penalties, but anyone who possesses them without a prescription or outside of normal medical practice could. In Louisiana, people who possess Schedule IV drugs can face up to five years in prison, while people who produce, distribute or intend to distribute such drugs can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. They can also face thousands of dollars in fines.
The bill would address a growing frustration among anti-abortion activists: the persistent flow of abortion pills into states with abortion bans, thanks to suppliers who operate outside of the US healthcare system and who use the internet and mail to help people looking to evade abortion bans.
In March, a study found that in the six months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, about 26,000 more Americans used pills to induce their own at-home abortions than would have done so had Roe not collapsed.
Elisa Wells, co-director of Plan C, a website that maintains a directory of abortion pill suppliers, was unconvinced that this bill would succeed in cracking down on such suppliers.
“Pills by mail – they’re in all 50 states and authorities have not been able to prevent that from happening,” Wells said. “The mail system is large and complex and many things are traveling through the mail that the authorities have not been able to regulate. We think it’s too large a problem for them to effectively address.”
A week after the committee on administration of criminal justice advanced the bill to criminalize possession of mifepristone and misoprostol, that same committee shot down a bill that would have carved out exceptions in Louisiana’s abortion ban to allow children under 16 to get the procedure if they have been the victims of rape or incest. Louisiana law currently does not permit abortions in those circumstances.
“That baby [in the womb] is innocent,” said one Republican committee member, Dodie Horton, as she voted against the bill, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. “We have to hang on to that.”
The Democratic representative who proposed that bill, Delisha Boyd, said that her mother gave birth to Boyd after being raped at 15. Her mother never got over the rape and died before 30, according to Boyd.
Since the abortion ban took effect, the OB-GYN Neelima Sukhavasi told state legislators that she and colleagues had helped teenagers deliver babies after being raped.
“One of these teenagers delivered a baby while clutching a teddy bear,” Sukhavasi said, according to ABC News. “And that’s an image that once you see that, you can’t unsee it.”
The sponsor of the bill to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances, the Republican senator Thomas Pressly, also drew on personal experience. His sister has said her then husband slipped her a drug to cause an abortion without her knowledge in 2022.
However, mifepristone and misoprostol are not only used in abortions. They can also be used to manage miscarriages, which can resemble abortions. Dealing with miscarriages has become far more fraught in the wake of Roe’s demise, as women and doctors alike fear that women who go to hospitals for help after miscarriages could be wrongly accused of having illegal abortions and face criminal consequences.
“Nobody should be afraid to seek medical care when they need it,” Wells said. “These laws that are trying to restrict access to abortion are creating that fear and causing people to not know about their options and not trust in the options that they have available to them.”
