Abortion Pills will potentially make illegal abortion medically safer than it has ever been. The challenge will be providing legal protection people involved in its use. Miscarriage, and ectopic pregnancy. on the other hand, will be less safe, medically and legally, and will require a tremendous educational effort, as well as new regulations.
For some women, abortion pills will be a godsend. Take the example of a woman in Texas who learns she is pregnant. She contacts AidAcess in Europe; abortion pills are sent to her from India; she takes them when most convenient; and receives the support she might need over the internet while she ends her pregnancy. No one is the wiser.
But staying silent is a lot of stress to load onto younger women, especially teenagers. And in Texas, if a teenager tells her best friend, who promises not to tell, then, in time honored tradition of teenagers, the best friend tells someone else who promises not to tell. Eventually there will be a person would like to make a quick buck. In Texas, the the girl cannot be sued (yet), but a mother who knows about the abortion is a potential target.
Abortion pills alone will only go so far to solve the problem of the religious tyranny we are facing. Definitely not a panacea. For African Americans and other oppressed groups, it will be of some, but less help. Medical abortion at home is much more convenient and much less expensive than traveling to another state for an abortion. But you have to be able to afford the pills, have access to the internet, and if you are caught, you will be punished more severely. So there will still be deaths from abortion, but fortunately, many fewer than before Roe.
When the Texas law is no longer necessary and Texas can simply outlaw abortion, they will take a different approach. Keeping to the fiction they don’t want to punish those who have abortions, but only those who aid and abet, will inevitably lead to criminalizing abortion pills, and treating them the way illegal drugs are treated now. They definitely will definitely start punishing those who have abortions, one way or another.
So one very important thing to do now is to pressure the FDA to make this medication available over the counter, or at least reduce their restrictions on its distribution. Then the court system will have to decide whether states can criminalize a drug, an abortion pill, that the FDA has approved. Even a right wing judge might hesitate to set a precedent where one state can criminalize the possession of a drug that the FDA allows.
A boon for illegal abortions, medication abortion will contribute to increasing dangers for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy.
Prior to Roe when women showed up hemorrhaging through their vaginas and also had severe bruising to their lower abdomens, evidence of clorox poisoning, or punctures to their uterus, it was clear that these women had attempted an illegal abortion. Now, however, in the rare case that someone who had taken abortion pills, has excess bleeding and goes to a hospital, her abortion will be indistinguishable from a miscarriage, meaning that every miscarriage will be suspect.
This suspicion will combine with other woman-damaging changes designed to attack vulnerable miscarriage sufferers. In most Red states, protection of the pregnant woman’s health is no longer an exception to an abortion ban. In a stalled miscarriage, the medical practitioners will be not be required to perform an abortion if “only” the uterus is imperiled. They can wait until her life is in danger. The level of chance of death is not specified. 10%, 50%, 90%?
Prior to Roe, women who were undergoing a miscarriage had the option of a D & C, which is now deemed an abortion by the antiabortion crowd. People with ectopic pregnancies were treated as soon as possible. Now there are even some right wingers crazy enough to think that destroying an embryo or a fetus implanted somewhere outside the womb is an abortion because a doctor could just stick it back in the uterus where it belongs.
The Federal government can legislate pregnancy-friendly policies by withholding medicare funds and licensing from hospitals and medical practitioners who fail to protect the fertility and health of women who have miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Congress can highlight the cruelty of the antiabortionists while simultaneously protecting the lives and health of women through laws that even some Republicans will find difficult to oppose. They just have to do it,