The Anti-Abortion Movement Wants to Jail You For Abortion Pills

The "pro-life" effort to turn moms, friends, aunties, sisters, and neighbors into criminal drug traffickers.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

The anti-abortion movement is taking aim at abortion pills. And importantly, they’re taking aim at speech about abortion pills — trying to outlaw it — and at people who help to secure abortion pills for those in need. They want to throw those people — moms, friends, sisters who try to help a loved one in need — in jail for drug trafficking.

After they succeeded in stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing judges who overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of legal abortion in America, the anti-abortion movement faced a new conundrum: Unlike in the pre-Roe era, when abortions had to be done via a physical procedure, most abortions today happen via pill, either misoprostol alone, or a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol. All over the world, these abortion inducing medications are used to end pregnancies safely and effectively. One big benefit of these medications is that they allow abortions to be done in private, with no doctor needed; another is that these pills are commonly used for a slate of other purposes, including ulcer treatment and stopping hemorrhaging, and they have been around for decades, so they are cheap and ubiquitous. They’re also safe, and especially in places where abortion is outlawed or hard to get, often a much safer option than going to a potentially untrained person for a procedure, which carries the risk of puncture or infection. With pills, the most common complication is that the abortion doesn’t complete, and in that case, it’s the same treatment as for a miscarriage — and health workers can’t typically tell the difference between a miscarriage and an incomplete abortion, because they are, in fact, the same physical process.

So abortion pills have changed the game, and have allowed a lot of women to end pregnancies safely even in places where abortion is restricted.

The anti-abortion movement does not want that. Which is why they are seeking to criminalize abortion pills, and radically restrict information about them.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told Caroline Kitchener of the Washington Post (and you should read Caroline’s whole piece on this). That means the mom who goes online and finds pills for her scared teenage daughter. It means the husband who helps his wife, the big sister who helps out her little one, the trusted aunt who helps her niece.

Think of all of the people who will step in to help a loved one in crisis. Now imagine they’re collectively treated as criminal drug traffickers.

These laws will impact everyone, including many people who self-identify as pro-life — lots of pro-life people have abortions, or help loved ones have abortions. But let’s also be clear about who these laws will initially target. The leaders and actors of the anti-abortion movement understand that it will be really, really unpopular to throw nice white suburban moms of pregnant teenagers in jail. And so they’ll go for the less sympathetic cases first. If I was wagering a guess, I’d say that looks like throwing low-income and Black men in jail, and tarring them as irresponsible scumbags looking to shirk their responsibilities. I’d say it looks like women who are single parents and who are struggling financially. I’d say it looks like anyone with a drug abuse disorder.

Eventually, of course, it could very well be the nice white suburban mom or the dedicated husband or the college professor aunt. Eventually, of course, it will be women who are seeking these pills for themselves — despite the claims of the anti-abortion movement, all over the world, where abortion is criminalized, women go to jail. Women are already going to jail in the US for using drugs that harm a fetus. How would it make sense to criminalize a pregnant women for using, say, cocaine under the theory that she’s trafficking drugs to a minor or endangering a child (yes, this really is the legal basis for many of these cases), but not criminalize a pregnant woman for taking a drug intended to end her pregnancy? In a “pro-life” nation, that’s tantamount to child murder. And trust me when I say that it is absolutely where this is all headed.

In the shorter term, all of us could lose access to basic information about abortion pills, thanks to a concerted anti-abortion effort to shut down information about abortion-inducing medications. From Caroline’s Washington Post piece:

Texas lawmakers are drafting legislation that would compel internet providers to block people from accessing abortion pill websites like Europe-based Aid Access and other online pharmacies within state borders, said Seago, though even antiabortion lawyers say that effort would raise free speech concerns. Another proposal would refashion the enforcement mechanism behind the six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021, empowering private citizens to enforce the law through civil litigation at any stage of pregnancy, not just after six weeks.

Efforts to block websites that contain information about abortion are incredibly dangerous. They violate basic free speech rights, for one, so the next time you hear conservatives whine about the left violating free speech for, say, banning a Nazi from Twitter, understand that their dedication to free speech is cynical and self-serving. But it also sets us down a very dangerous and dystopian path where sharing any information about abortion — including advocating for abortion rights — could be seen as “aiding and abetting” the procedure, and summarily shut down.

The anti-abortion movement has long been on a dedicated disinformation campaign, simply making a lot of stuff up and billing it as fact. Even before Roe fell, they succeeded in writing into state law requirements that doctors warn women about the dangers of abortion — dangers that were entirely made up, and had no basis in research or evidence. They succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to agree that an employer’s religious belief that contraception was tantamount to abortion was sufficient for that employer to refuse to allow contraception be covered in employee health plans — and it didn’t matter, the Court said, if that belief was objectively, scientifically wrong, because matters of faith are not matters of science (even when the matter of faith is, indeed, a question answered by science). Now, they’re claiming that abortion pills create toxins in the water supply; they’re claiming that the FDA was too speedy in approving abortion pills for the public.

It’s all a big mess of lies, but that’s not the point. The point is to force women into the most dangerous circumstances possible, and to criminalize anyone who resists this reactionary “pro-life” worldview, which is less about abortion and more about restoring hyper-traditional gender roles — stripping women of our ability to plan our families and by extension the rest of our lives.

The anti-abortion movement will absolutely create a “pro-life” dystopia by force, including by locking up women and the people who care about them. The question isn’t where they’re trying to take the country — they’ve been very clear on that. The question is whether we let them get there.

xx Jill

p.s. If I were living in a conservative state, I would get my hands on some of these pills now. They have a long shelf life, and at least for now, they are relatively easy to secure for yourself or a loved one.