Louisiana descends into dystopia with historic law on abortion pills | Arwa Mahdawi

There’s something rotten in the state of Louisiana

Louisiana is not a great place to get pregnant. If you need an abortion, a near-total ban means it’s almost impossible to get one, even in cases of rape or incest – anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal can go to jail for 15 years. And if you plan on having the baby, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Although, as Senator Bill Cassidy has helpfully noted, “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”. In other words, if you ignore Black people (a third of his constituents), things look a little better. So that’s OK then!

This week, Louisiana decided to descend further into dystopia and passed a first-of-its-kind law making abortion pills a controlled substance. Senate Bill 276 makes possession of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Republicans excel at using sneaky tactics to undermine our rights, and this bill is no exception. When it was originally put forward, you see, the bill didn’t include the amendment that turns abortion pills into Schedule IV drugs – a classification normally given to dangerous or addictive substances. Rather, the bill was positioned as a way to protect pregnant people by making it a crime to intentionally give an abortion-inducing drug to a pregnant woman without her consent. Everyone can get behind that idea, right?

There was also an emotional story behind the legislation that made it easy to sell. Senator Thomas Pressly, the author of the bill, explained that his sister, Catherine Herring, had been slipped the abortion pill by her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Various outlets have said that Herring then managed to save the baby through a “medical abortion reversal process”. KTBS, for example, a Louisiana media outlet, reported that Herring “used a pill-reversal regimen and her baby is still alive”.

I’m sorry … what? I’m not a doctor but this story sounds medically implausible. Sara Pentlicky, who is a doctor (a gynecologist) and an abortion provider, told me much the same thing.

“If [Herring] took medication abortion pills and was still pregnant with a baby, the only explanation is that the pills didn’t work, which is a possibility,” Pentlicky said when I ran the scenario past her. There are, however, she notes, organizations that “prescribe progesterone to people who have taken medication abortion pills with the false information that it can reverse the medication abortion”. The New York attorney general is currently cracking down on these organizations, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said the procedures are “unproven and unethical”. They’re also dangerous: a recent study looking at the effects of progesterone on people who had taken mifepristone was halted after “the third hemorrhage”.

To be clear, I’m not saying Pressly is lying about what his sister went through: Herring’s husband pleaded guilty to injuring a child and the assault of a pregnant person and was sentenced to six months in jail. But it does rather feel like Pressly has weaponized elements of his sister’s story to position a regressive law as a way to protect women. That’s certainly how it’s being defended following a backlash to the law, anyway. On Friday, for example, Landry tweeted that safety was the motivation behind the bill. “Proud to stand with our legislature to ensure this drug can be obtained legally and safely – ensuring the protection of all women. Without this bill, women and the unborn are more susceptible to predators,” Landry said.

Let’s be very clear here: this isn’t about protecting women at all. Rather it’s about making abortion pills even more difficult to access in Louisiana than they already are. More than 200 doctors in Louisiana have signed a letter to lawmakers warning that reclassification could provide a “barrier to physicians’ ease of prescribing appropriate treatment” and cause unnecessary fear and confusion among patients and doctors. Which, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion activists want.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of all this is that it’s almost certain that Louisiana has just set a dangerous new trend. As Pentlicky notes: “Every time a state succeeds in passing any type of abortion restriction, we see other states follow suit – it just becomes more and more egregious.”

In short, expect Louisiana’s crackdown on abortion pills to come to a red state near you soon.

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