Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed a historic bill into law on Friday that designates two medications that cause abortions as prohibited and hazardous medicines.
One day after the bill’s final legislative passing in the state Senate, the Republican governor of Louisiana indicated that he would be signing it in Baton Rouge.
The legislation impacts the medications misoprostol and mifepristone, which are used in medication abortions, the most popular type of abortion performed in the United States.
Many doctors opposed the bill, arguing that there are important applications for the pharmaceuticals in reproductive health care and that reclassifying them would make it more difficult to give them.
The bill’s proponents said it would shield expectant mothers from forced abortions, yet they only provided one instance of such occurring in the state of Texas.
The bill was passed while opponents of abortion wait for the US Supreme Court to rule on a move to limit access to mifepristone.
On October 1, the new law will go into force.
The original intent of the bill was to make “coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud” a crime. The primary sponsor of the law, Shreveport, Louisiana senator Thomas Pressly, a Republican, sponsored an amendment to the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law that placed abortion medicines under Schedule IV.
“Requiring an abortion inducing drug to be obtained with a prescription and criminalizing the use of an abortion drug on an unsuspecting mother is nothing short of common-sense,” Landry stated.
Both medications now require a prescription, and using them to induce an abortion is generally illegal in Louisiana. Obtaining the medicines would be more difficult due to the bill. Other medicines classified as Schedule IV include the opioid tramadol and the benzodiazepine class of depressants.
Being found in possession of the drugs without a legitimate prescription would result in severe penalties, such as heavy fines and jail time.
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The bill’s wording seems to provide some protections for expectant mothers who buy the medication for personal use without a prescription.
Because of the classification, physicians would need a special license in order to administer the medications, and they would need to keep them in designated facilities, which might be located distant from rural clinics in some situations.
Mifepristone and misoprostol are commonly used to induce abortions, but they can also be used to cure miscarriages, induce labor, and halt bleeding.
In a letter to lawmakers, more than 200 medical professionals in the state expressed concern that the proposed legislation would create a “barrier to physicians’ ease of prescribing appropriate treatment” and unnecessarily confuse and scare patients as well as physicians.
In a state with one of the highest rates of maternal death in the nation, the doctors caution that delaying getting the medications could have a negative impact on the situation.
Pressly claimed that his sister Catherine Herring of Texas’s ordeal motivated him to campaign for the legislation. Herring’s husband attempted to force an abortion on her without her knowledge or consent in 2022 by giving her seven misoprostol pills.
