Abortion Pills, Once a Workaround, Are Now a Target [View all]

[Demovictory9]

Abortion Pills, Once a Workaround, Are Now a Target
In advance of a Supreme Court decision, states are proposing new restrictions and heavier criminal penalties on medication abortion.

Last year, after Texas passed its strict abortion ban, surgical abortions in the state dropped by half. Many women found a workaround: pills. The week the law took effect, requests for medication abortion shot up to 138 a day from 11 a day at just one service that delivers the pills by mail.

Anti-abortion lawmakers in the state were already on it. That same week, they passed another law making it a felony to provide abortion pills through the mail and requiring doctors to comply with new testing and reporting procedures to prescribe them.

Medication abortion is the new front in the nation’s five-decade-long fight, as both sides anticipate that by summer the Supreme Court could overturn or pare back the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.


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To anti-abortion activists, who believe ending a pregnancy is murder, the pills are a back door to be locked shut with new restrictions and heavier criminal penalties. In the first three months of this year, legislators proposed more than 100 restrictions on medication in 22 states.

States such as Missouri are attempting to reach beyond their borders to stop their residents from going elsewhere to get an abortion, by pill or by surgery. Connecticut and California, meanwhile, are rushing to protect their citizens who might be penalized for helping women in restrictive states obtain the medication. One pill manufacturer has sued to stop a Mississippi law that requires the pills to be picked up and swallowed in a doctor’s office.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/abortion-pills.html