Now They’re Coming for Abortion Medication
Now They’re Coming for Abortion Medication
The right is trying to significantly roll back access to mifepristone, writes Jessica Valenti.
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If you’re not following Jessica Valenti’s Substack, Abortion, Every Day, please do. With a New York Times bestselling book now out on the subject, Abortion. Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win., Valenti is a true expert on the insanity of the conservative right’s push to regulate women’s bodies.
I know this is outside my usual Chills fare, but I was alarmed to read Valenti’s recent Substack post about a newly amended complaint from Republican attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri and Idaho against the FDA. The suit, she explains, seeks to “significantly roll back access to mifepristone and ban the shipping of abortion medication.”
“The suit — which is filled with anti-abortion misinformation, scare tactics, and bizarre claims about women and girls’ health, including the idea that abortion medication ‘starves the baby to death in the womb’ — is conservatives’ latest attempt to go after mifepristone,” she writes.
This matters as our options to maintain control over our bodies as women shrinks, not to mention the options for cisgender men who are sleeping with or partnered with women.
The number of women who take abortion medication is high and rising: The nonprofit Guttmacher Institute reports that there were about 642,700 medication abortions in the U.S. in 2023, accounting for 63 percent of all abortions in the “formal health care system.” This is up from 2020, when such procedures accounted for 53 percent of all abortions.
“This increase is indicative of the fact that people are overcoming barriers to get the care they need,” Amy Friedrich-Karnik, the director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, told NBC News in March.
While the newly amended case against the FDA was brought by three specific states, “a ruling would impact the entire country — even pro-choice states,” Valenti writes. “And for as much as Republicans are trying to run from their anti-abortion extremism, this complaint makes crystal clear just how hyper-focused they are on banning abortion everywhere.”
You can read the rest of Valenti’s post here.
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