#Louisiana SB276

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Karen Thompson for Abortion, Every Day:

Earlier this year Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law SB 276, a first-of-its-kind legislation classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. The drugs, commonly used to perform medication abortions, are responsible for 63% of abortions in the US. As a result of this new law, mere possession of mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription in Louisiana can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”  We know what happens now: The outcome of this new layer of criminalization is entirely foreseeable. By putting the pills on a drug registry with special access rules, providers are no longer able to easily prescribe the pills and the ability of OB/GYNs to nimbly provide needed—and even emergency—health care if a woman is miscarrying is chilled. In Louisiana’s telling, mife and miso are the new heroin and medication abortion care puts pregnant people’s lives in jeopardy, not their own dangerous law. The lack of situational awareness around the law would be comical if the inevitable devastation of its effects wasn’t so horrifying. 

This is true even for people who are not using the drugs to end their pregnancies, but for the myriad other health issues the drugs treat—from softening the cervix for an endometrial biopsy to the insertion of IUDs. But the massive burden SB 276 places on pregnant people—particularly those seeking to self-manage their own abortions—is disastrous. By reclassifying a safe, effective, regulated drug used for a broad range of healthcare purposes into a dangerous controlled substance whose distribution and use can be entered and tracked in a state database, Louisiana, as one local health care provider noted, would “effectively be creating a database of every woman who is prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, regardless of the reason, truly monitoring women and their pregnancies. That should be unimaginable in America.”

Such policing is not only very much imaginable in America, but has been the country’s sad truth for decades. Before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, state surveillance and criminalization of women during pregnancy and around their pregnancy outcomes—based on their alleged drug use, in particular—was the daily truth for countless women and other people who can become pregnant. A past truth is simply devolving into a dystopian present.  To be clear, classifying drugs in light of their potential harms is not a new thing. One of the most infamous classification tools, the Controlled Substances Act, has been in place since the 1970s, when President Nixon signed it into law. The CSA became the enforcing mechanism for Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and gave both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration power to determine which substances were fit for medical use. Such regulation can serve a useful purpose; the CSA is itself the legislative grandchild of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required food and drug manufacturers to clearly label any product that contained dangerous substances, including morphine and opium, drugs often included in everyday products from soft drinks to teething medicines. 

But SB 276 is not trying to protect babies. As John Erhlichman, one of Richard Nixon’s Watergate co-conspirators, bluntly stated in 1994: “[w]e knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could . . . vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  Once again, government actors are lying about drugs to criminalize women’s access to and control over their own social and bodily autonomy. Louisiana’s law unmasks in broad daylight what so many people and communities living with the consequences of bad drug policy have long known: the “war on drugs” is a political invention to construct fiscal and social power over individuals and communities, not to provide much needed public health services. 

[...] By criminalizing possession of abortion medication, the Venn diagram of overlap between the “war on drugs” and the war on reproductive freedom has, once again, become a perfect circle. The efforts to control reproduction and drugs are rooted in the same forms of bigotry: controlling women’s behavior and liberties rather than providing actionable solutions to satisfy public health needs. 

Karen Thompson writes for Abortion, Every Day the impacts of criminalization of abortion medication as the new era of the War on Drugs takes shape in the post-Roe era.

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Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

On Friday, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law that classifies the two most common abortion-inducing drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — as controlled and dangerous substances, and that legislation goes into effect today. These two medications make up the most common method for abortion in the United States and now, women in Louisiana will have a difficult time gaining access to both. While the law in Louisiana previously required a prescription for both drugs, and made it a crime to use them to induce an abortion, this new law will make it even harder for doctors to treat patients in the state with the medication, as the pills will be harder to obtain. Unlike these two medications, the other drugs that are listed as Schedule IV controlled and dangerous drugs in the State of Louisiana were listed as such to reflect a designation typically reserved for drugs that carry a risk of abuse or dependence, like opioids and benzodiazepines. Just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, the State of Louisiana enacted a near total abortion ban, making it illegal to obtain an abortion in most circumstances and criminalizing doctors who provide the service. Due to these restrictions, many people in the state have been forced to obtain these medications through the mail. In a #WeCount survey in May of 2024, done by The Society of Family Planning abortion activist group, it was revealed that roughly 8,000 women a month in predominantly abortion ban states were getting mifepristone and misoprostol by mail at the end of 2023. [...]

This new law also helps to set the stage for an inevitable lawsuit by the State of Louisiana, against doctors who are prescribing the medications from other states with legal shield law protections in place. As Conservative states were enacting bans on abortion access, several Democratic-controlled states — like Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont and Washington — enacted shield laws meant to protect providers from prosecution in other states. These laws denote that the only state with jurisdiction to prosecute doctors who prescribe by mail are the states in which the doctor is physically located. [...] This is yet another case that will ultimately make it through the appeal courts and all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. This medication restriction in Louisiana is ultimately the catalyst for an attempt to restrict the medication across the entire United States, and considering the current Conservative Majority on the highest court in the land, it might just work.

Louisiana’s disgraceful mifepristone and misoprostol ban bill SB276 is pure government overreach by anti-abortion reactionaries.

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Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette:

Last week, Louisiana lawmakers empowered child rapists by voting down a bill that would have allowed an exception in their abortion ban for their victims. This week, they’re looking into classifying abortion pills as a Schedule IV “controlled substance” so that they can harshly prosecute people for helping to distribute them to those in need. The provision was added as an amendment to SB276, a bill that “creates the crime of coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud to prohibit a third-party from knowingly using an abortion-inducing drug to cause, or attempt to cause, an abortion on an unsuspecting pregnant mother without her knowledge or consent and amends various abortion criminal laws to add the crime of attempted abortion.”

It is deeply concerning that Louisiana legislators are wholly unaware that all of this is already illegal. It is illegal, except in some emergency situations and even then only by medical professionals, to give anyone any kind of medication without their knowledge and informed consent. If they think this is legal, well, I wouldn’t leave my drink around a single one of them, is all I’m saying. It’s also clear that they don’t really understand what controlled substances are, why some drugs are scheduled and others are not, nor anything about the specific drugs they are trying to control. Misoprostol, for instance, is primarily used to prevent ulcers from NSAIDs, as well as to help stop postpartum hemorrhaging after a miscarriage. Mifepristone is sometimes used during labor, during IUD placement, during cancer biopsies, for Cushing’s syndrome and uterine fibroids.

[...] The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Thomas Pressly, introduced it partially for personal reasons, because his sister’s ex-husband actually did secretly dose her with an abortion drug, and was not, in Pressly and his sister’s estimation, punished severely enough for it. He served 180 days in jail, and the bill would raise that to 10 years and up to $75,000 in fines. It would be one thing to increase the penalties for dosing anyone in any kind of way, but there’s a reason they’re specifying abortion drugs. What they want is to prevent people from getting them for women who want to take them voluntarily but cannot because of their state’s gross law, and to institute major penalties for this. What they want is to be able to better track doctors who may still be prescribing these pills to abortion-seeking patients for reasons other than abortion.

Louisiana's SB276 bill to classify abortion pills such as mifepristone and misoprostol as "controlled substances" are an attack on reproductive freedom and family planning.

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Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a bill on Friday classifying abortion medication as a controlled substance—the first law of its kind in the nation. Let’s talk about what the policy is, what it will do, and how we can expect to see this strategy exported to other states. First and foremost, I want to make something clear: If you live in Louisiana, you can still obtain abortion medication. Doctors in pro-choice shield states can ship the pills to you, and this new law doesn’t criminalize pregnant people for possessing or taking abortion medication. In the footer of this email, you’ll find information about safe places to order the medication, along with free helplines for legal or medical advice.1 I say this upfront because the law is an attempt to create a chilling effect that dissuades people from ordering abortion medication online or using telehealth to get the pills shipped from blue states.

Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers know that many, many women have been able to get abortions despite the state’s ban—largely thanks to abortion medication and doctors in pro-choice states. In fact, a recent study showed that 8,000 women a month are getting abortion medication mailed from providers in shield states. Conservatives really don’t like that. They’re also super eager to punish abortion funds and local activists who have been helping patients get the medication. That’s why Louisiana Republicans made possession of the pills without a prescription is punishable by up to five years in prison. In short, the law allows the state to go after abortion funds as drug dealers and traffickers. Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists hope that this increased penalty will make would-be abortion patients too afraid to seek out the medication, and Louisianans too afraid to help each other obtain it.

As I’ve pointed out previously, controlled substances are also tracked in a state database—which increases the chilling effect and aligns with what we’ve seen more broadly in conservative attacks on data and privacy. The Louisiana law comes at same time that the GOP and anti-abortion groups in Indiana are working to make women’s abortion reports public records, and as Republican Senators propose legislation that would enable them to harvest pregnant women’s information. 

[...] The physical danger of the law doesn’t stop there. Classifying abortion medication as a controlled substance means that doctors will need to have a special license to prescribe the medication, and that the pills will be stored differently—with a tighter process to access them, even in an emergency.

Jessica Valenti's Abortion, Every Day Substack blog gives you the primer of Louisiana SB276, the first of its kind law that classified abortion medication as Schedule IV "controlled substances." This is just the first salvo for anti-abortion extremists who want a return to the Comstock enforcement days by banning abortion medications.