If you are someone who can get pregnant, I am begging you now: Obtain abortion pills. Get them because you may need them. Also get them because someone else you know might need them, too.
The forced-birth movement has, quite cannily, made banning mifepristone one of its highest priorities. If a “national abortion ban” sounds scary to you, well, social conservatives have been scared off of it as well. Reproductive choice has triumphed at the ballot box since Dobbs and national Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric. Their recognition that banning abortion is extremely unpopular is where the assault on mifepristone comes in.
National Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric.
Over 50% of all abortions are pill-induced “medical abortions,” as opposed to “procedural abortions.” If crusaders against reproductive care can use the regulatory state — pause to inhale the stinging scent of hypocrisy wafting over from those “small-government” folks — to ban or even just further complicate access to medical abortion on a national level, it could hand the forced-birth movement an even bigger victory than Dobbs.
As The Washington Post reported last week, anti-abortion advocates are already planning for a Trump White House sympathetic to their anti-medical abortion agenda. Former President Donald Trump may not be eager to pass a national ban — he is attuned to popularity contests, after all. But Trump could be persuaded to allow his Department of Justice and Health and Human Services leaders to crack down on abortion pills via mechanisms at their disposal. The Food and Drug Administration, remember, has the power to take drugs off the market.
That this conservative Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about mifepristone availability this year means that restrictions are likely coming. We can only guess at how close to a total ban the decision will be — and whether President Joe Biden’s FDA…
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