Louisiana Aims To Criminalize Abortion Pills, Echoing Project 2025 Blueprint
A Republican effort to reclassify 2 abortion drugs as Schedule IV dangerous controlled substances could imprison women for unprescribed possession. Project 2025 plans similar tactics nationally.
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Donald Trump said he would leave the issue of abortion to the states. This is what that looks like.
Republican lawmakers in Louisiana are undertaking a new legislative effort to reclassify the abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol as Schedule IV controlled dangerous substances and prosecute any unprescribed possession of them. The reclassification would place these abortion drugs in the same category as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.
Abortions are already banned entirely in Louisiana, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Louisiana had the fifth-highest maternal mortality rate of any state in the country between 2018-2021, according to KFF. These kinds of policy pursuits will only make that death rate higher.
The amendment to SB 276 was sponsored by Republican State Senator Thomas Pressly. If a person is caught with an abortion pill without a prescription, the amendment would make it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, according to CNN’s analysis.
Over 270 doctors, healthcare providers, and other medical experts signed a letter expressing concern over Senator Pressly’s amendment.
The letter declares that “neither mifepristone nor misoprostol have been shown to have any potential for abuse, dependence, public health risk, nor high rates of adverse side effects.” The medical experts went on to state that the bill creates “the false perception that these are dangerous drugs that require additional regulation.”
The abortion pill amendment faces a vote for final approval on June 3.
Currently, both mifepristone and misoprostol are FDA-approved, can be prescribed online, and can be mailed to those seeking abortion care. According to the Guttmacher Institute, medication-induced abortions account for 63% of abortions across the United States.
It’s that statistic that has made abortion pills a prime target for anti-abortion Republicans. While Trump has dubiously claimed that he won’t sign a national abortion ban, his allies in Project 2025 are plotting other ways he can target abortion access. And some of them are along the very same lines as this Louisiana bill.
Project 2025 calls on a future Trump administration to force the FDA to revoke approval of the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. They want the FTC to prosecute virtual clinics that prescribe abortion pills and the EPA to classify chemicals found in abortion drugs as “forever chemicals.” They also cite the use of the archaic Comstock Act to restrict and criminalize abortion pill access and, in an extreme interpretation of the law, restrict all abortions at the federal level through bans on mailing abortion-related material.
Let’s take a look at how the architects of many of Trump’s second-term agenda items are planning to target abortion pills nationwide.
How Project 2025 Plans To Target Abortion Pills
The 100 right-wing groups at Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation, have outlined exactly how Trump can bypass Congress and exploit executive power to unilaterally restrict abortion access nationwide.
One of Project 2025’s most distributing anti-abortion proposals, and most easily accessible to the next Republican president, is how they plan to restrict abortion pill access.
If you’re unfamiliar with Project 2025, it’s essentially a playbook culminating in an authoritarian plot that plans to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with GOP loyalists and effectively turn the federal government into a tool of the far-right.
I’ve written extensively about this, discussed it on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, and did a deep dive on the Meidas Touch Network with PoliticsGirl. Trump is on board with much of Project 2025, and it aligns with his Agenda 47.
Project 2025 has a section of its 920-page “Mandate For Leadership” dedicated to abortion pills. On page 458, Project 2025 goes into detail about why they want to target these abortion pills. It specifically calls out mifepristone and misoprostol:
“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world. The rate of chemical abortion in the U.S. has increased by more than 150 percent in the past decade; more than half of annual abortions in the U.S. are chemical rather than surgical.
The abortion pill regimen is typically a two-part process. The first pill, mifepristone, causes the death of the unborn child by cutting off the hormone progesterone, which is required to sustain a pregnancy. The second pill, misoprostol, causes contractions to induce a delivery of the dead child and uterine contents, usually into a toilet at home".”
Project 2025 goes on to give specific instructions to the FDA on how they should regulate abortion drugs. They call on the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone and misoprostol and end its distribution in the market. And if the FDA disagrees, they want the next Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary to override the FDA’s approval of the drug - a power the HHS Department has.
They’re also urging the EPA to re-classify the chemicals in the abortion pills as a “forever chemical” to place more robust regulations on it.
That’s not all. They want to use the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute virtual clinics that prescribe abortion pills in states with abortion restrictions.
Now, this is where it gets taken up a notch. They plan on using the archaic Comstock Act from 1873 in an attempt to not only criminalize abortion pill access but to potentially criminalize abortions generally.
The Comstock Act bans “mailing obscene or crime-inciting matter.” What it considers crime-inciting material is “lewd or lascivious material,” including an “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” or “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The law is currently being invoked in a case before the Supreme Court seeking to force the FDA to take mifepristone off the market.
The law was made irrelevant by Roe. v. Wade, but with that ruling overturned, Republicans have been eager to use it to criminalize the mailing of abortion material. Project 2025 calls for the next Republican Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act. This could be enforced not just in states where abortion is banned but everywhere in the country.
The law could be used against drug companies, distributors of abortion pills, doctors, and women who receive abortion material. Mary Ziegler, law professor and a Guggenheim Fellow, wrote a piece in The New York Times that detailed how this could play out:
Project 2025’s road map argues that a Republican Justice Department should enforce Comstock “against providers and distributors” of abortion pills. A Trump administration could follow through on these plans by prosecuting doctors and drug companies anywhere in the country: The Comstock Act, as a federal law, could be read to override state protections for abortion rights.
Some key abortion opponents, like the former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, argue that Comstock should be interpreted as an effective ban on all abortions because every procedure that takes place in the United States relies on some item placed in the mail, from a surgical glove to a curet. Mr. Mitchell and his allies read the law to exclude explicit exceptions for the life or health of the patient.
Understood in this way, the law could punish women who receive abortion-related items or information using the Postal Service or another carrier or even websites.
The Biden Administration’s Justice Department pushes back on this interpretation, arguing that the Comstock Act “does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully. Because there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion, the mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”
Trump-appointed judges have ruled in favor of the right-wing interpretation, leading to uncertainty about how this could be ruled on in the future.
The Supreme Court ruling on abortion pill access is expected to come this Summer. We’ll see how they interpret the Comstock Act. This will prove vital to indicating whether this Supreme Court would uphold a second-term Trump’s attempts at banning abortion pills nationwide, or worse, abortion itself.
The bottom line is this: If Donald Trump is re-elected, we’re very likely going to see attempts to restrict abortion pills nationwide. It’s outlined in the second term agenda of the allies currently screening and training staff for a second Trump administration. Trump can say whatever he likes, but he said he was “proud” of his role in overturning Roe v. Wade. We shouldn’t be surprised if he implements anti-abortion measures nationwide along the lines of what his allies have outlined for him.
We need to keep informing Americans about these plans. A lot is at stake this November.
