Anti-abortion activists have been attacking mifepristone for decades. That mission has resulted in unnecessary restrictions on the abortion drug, renewed state legislative pushes to make it less accessible and a battery of lawsuits to get it yanked from the market altogether.
Misoprostol, the drug often prescribed with mifepristone for abortions, has been relatively unscathed. Due to its many uses outside of the abortion procedure, it’s remained much more readily available. Some doctors have already begun planning to carry out misoprostol-only abortions (still very effective, but with additional side effects) due to the constant threat to mifepristone’s legality.
Accordingly, the anti-abortion movement has shifted its focus. In May, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed legislation reclassifying mifepristone and misoprostol as Schedule IV controlled dangerous substances, despite outcry from the medical community. The change will go into effect on October 1.
Misoprostol — a lynchpin of reproductive care, from miscarriage to postpartum treatment, and given to patients at risk of hemorrhaging — is already being removed from emergency care carts at local hospitals, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.
Doctors fretted to the outlet about the difference seconds make when a patient is losing blood, that needing to stop treatment to jump through procedural hoops to get the medication could mean life or death. One provider raised the additional barriers rural or remote hospitals without in-house pharmacies will face in obtaining misoprostol, particularly on nights and weekends.
Louisiana overall has dismal maternal mortality rates in a country already getting routed on that measure compared to peer nations.
This is always how the anti-abortion movement operates. It’s palatable, and been historically successful, for those activists and allied politicians to paint abortion as a singular, siloed-off procedure that exists only in Planned Parenthood clinics. It’s easy, then, to demonize the supposed distinct set of women (and differently identifying people) who use those services too.
But it’s always been a lie. Abortion is a foundational part of health care, full stop. That applies to other procedures in the reproductive sphere, and those as seemingly far-flung as treatment for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Ripping the procedure itself and its associated drugs out of the medical universe has knock-on effects hurting many people beyond those seeking to end unwanted pregnancies (who also deserve unequivocal bodily autonomy).
Anti-abortion politicians know this. Over 200 doctors signed a letter exhorting Landry not to sign the law rescheduling mifepristone and misoprostol. He ignored them. The anti-abortion movement is willing to sacrifice women’s lives and their freedom to make its regime absolute. Louisianan women — many of whom will have just finished giving birth, the professed ideal of politicians like Landry — will unwillingly pay for that war effort with their blood.
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I guess when listing the cause of death for pregnant women in LA the coroner can now put Gov. Jeff Landry’s practicing medicine without a license.
Reproductive medical slavery exists. The state of Louisiana holds it owns women’s bodies. That women are state owned… slaves.
I have evil thoughts about trump
Democrats are pro-life. Republicans are pro-death.
Don’t forget Moscow Mitch.
There’s a certain twisted consistency between pro-natalist and pro-death; after all, you can’t die if you haven’t been born. So if your goal is, for whatever reason, to maximize death and human suffering, then you want plenty of births – otherwise you’re gonna run out of material after a while.