Mississippi has banned the prescription and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs.
The legislation, House Bill 1613, makes it unlawful to “sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute, dispense or possess with intent to sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute or dispense, a controlled substance,” as well as “create, sell, barter, transfer, distribute, dispense or possess with intent to create, sell, barter, transfer, distribute or dispense, a counterfeit substance.”
An “abortion-inducing drug” is defined in the bill as a “medicine, drug or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman to cause the death of the unborn child, except as otherwise provided by the laws of the State of Mississippi.”
Last year, the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 1 in 10 women who take mifepristone to induce abortions experience severe complications, a number at least 22 times as high as reported on the drug’s label.
The study, described by the think tank as the “largest-known study of the abortion pill,” found that “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.” It explained that the “real-world” rate of the serious adverse events is “at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of ‘less than 0.5 percent’ in clinical trials reported on the drug label.”
Separately, a federal judge has paused a case that Louisiana brought against the abortion pill mifepristone as the FDA reviews the drug’s safety. U.S. District Judge David Joseph wrote in an order that the “equities and the public interest weigh heavily in favor of FDA completing the job that the law requires it to do.” He explained, “Put differently, at this juncture, it is the completion of FDA’s promised good faith, evidence-based, and expeditious review of the mifepristone [review], not ‘government by lawsuit,’ that this Court finds to be in the public interest.”
