Louisiana Republicans Want to Make It Harder to Obtain a Medication That Stops Postpartum Hemorrhages

Antiabortion Republicans discuss an enormous sport about caring in regards to the sanctity of life, however as they’ve made abundantly clear, the one factor they care about is controlling girls’s our bodies—and in reality, couldn’t give much less of a f–k about pregnant individuals or the infants they wish to drive individuals to have. We know this due to:

Oh, and now we additionally understand it as a result of lawmakers in Louisiana—house of one of the crucial excessive abortion bans within the nation*—are so zealous about eradicating abortion that they’re proposing laws that may categorize mifepristone and misoprostol as managed harmful substances on par with opioids and different extremely addictive pharmaceuticals.

Per The Washington Post:

The modification would record mifepristone and misoprostol underneath the state’s Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Act…It elicited a robust response from greater than 240 Louisiana medical doctors, who known as it “not scientifically based.”

The pending language seems to open yet one more entrance within the nation’s bitter battle over if and the way girls can get hold of an abortion. Attempts to curtail treatment abortions—which now represent greater than half of all abortions within the United States—are a part of legislative agendas not simply in deep-red Louisiana however in lots of Republican-controlled statehouses. And in March, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case introduced towards the Food and Drug Administration by a bunch of antiabortion medical doctors in search of to restrict entry to mifepristone.

The laws was sponsored by Republican state senator Thomas Pressly, whose sister testified that her then husband spiked her drink with an abortion drug, which brought about her to have “intense cramping.” (Doctors had been in a position to save the being pregnant and Pressly’s former brother-in-law was sentenced to 180 days in jail; the invoice would carry a sentence of as much as 10 years in jail and a $75,000 fantastic.)

Obviously, nobody disagrees with the truth that what occurred to Pressly’s sister was horrific. But medical professionals don’t assume it ought to result in legal guidelines that may curtail the power of people that need to have abortions having the ability to take action, or classify a drugs as a managed substance that does way more than induce abortions. “Adding a safe, medically indicated drug for miscarriage management … creates the false perception that these are dangerous drugs that require additional regulation,” a bunch of Louisiana medical doctors wrote to Pressly. Crucially, the medical doctors famous that misoprostol can also be used to forestall gastrointestinal ulcers and to securely assist induce labor in people who find themselves prepared to offer delivery. As the Post notes, misoprostol can also be used after somebody has a miscarriage (after they physique doesn’t move the tissue by itself) and “to help stop postpartum hemorrhage, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in the state.”

“Given its historically poor maternal health outcomes, Louisiana should prioritize safe and evidence-based care for pregnant women,” the medical doctors wrote to Pressly. As Neelima Sukhavasi, an OB/GYN in Baton Rouge and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, instructed the Post: “To OB/GYNs, this is very worrisome. There’s no one that would endorse what happened to [Pressly’s] sister. But this is a safe medication that has many important lifesaving uses. It’s not addictive.” Nimra Chowdhry, senior state legislative counsel on the Center for Reproductive Rights, put it extra bluntly, saying the laws if handed “turns back the clock on modern medicine.” As within the type that stops postpartum girls from bleeding to dying.