Abortion-Keep Legal, Yes or No?

BREAKING🚨 One senator from Missouri is trying to ban the abortion pill for the entire country and call it “protecting women.”

Here’s what just happened.

Josh Hawley rolled out a bill with a friendly, focus-grouped name — the “Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act.” What it actually does is brutally simple: it orders the federal government to rip away FDA approval for mifepristone, the abortion pill used in most abortions in the United States, and makes distributing it for abortion a federal crime.

Not in red states. Everywhere.

Blue states that protected abortion after Roe fell. States where voters went to the ballot box and wrote abortion rights into their constitutions. Clinics that followed every rule the FDA set for more than 20 years. Telehealth doctors who treat patients in rural counties where there is no clinic at all. All of them would watch the ground vanish under their feet because one man from Missouri decided he knows better than every medical body in the country — and better than the state you live in.

Hawley stood at a podium in Washington, flanked by anti-abortion activists, and called mifepristone “inherently dangerous” and “inherently prone to abuse.” He waved around a cherry-picked analysis that claims roughly 11 percent of people who use the pill have “serious adverse events,” as if that one number outweighs decades of real-world data and every major medical organization saying plainly: this medication is safe when used as directed.

The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000. It has been studied, re-studied, and monitored ever since. Hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. Millions of uses. The rate of serious complications is extremely low — lower than many drugs Republicans never seem bothered about, including common antibiotics and Viagra. But nobody is introducing the “Safeguarding Men from Chemical Erectile Dysfunction Act.”

Instead, Hawley’s bill would:

- Force the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone for abortion, erasing more than two decades of science-based regulation.
- Make it illegal to ship, dispense, or label the drug for abortion, cutting off telehealth and mail-order options that people in ban states rely on now.
- Create a new legal weapon so people can sue drug makers and providers — not for lying, but simply for existing.

And he’s doing it days after a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana — a man hardly friendly to abortion rights — looked at a separate attack on mifepristone and said: no. That judge ordered the FDA to keep the pill on the market while it conducts yet another safety review, explicitly saying it’s the agency’s job, not a court’s, to weigh scientific evidence and make public health decisions.

Hawley’s response to that was not to respect the process. It was to say, essentially: if the courts won’t pull the plug, Congress will.

This is the game he’s playing. The Supreme Court already threw out one major lawsuit against mifepristone on standing grounds. A Louisiana judge just left access in place while telling the FDA to do its job. So Hawley is reaching for the one tool that bypasses both: raw congressional power to rewrite the drug’s legal status in one vote.

If he wins, it will not matter that your state protects abortion. It will not matter that your doctor believes mifepristone is the safest option. It will not matter that you are ten weeks pregnant, terrified, and too far from a clinic to make three separate trips. The pill will simply be gone.

And look at who this hurts most.

Not wealthy women who can buy last-minute plane tickets and hotel rooms in states that still have clinics. Not senators’ wives. Not the donors whose names are on the marble walls of Hawley’s favorite think tanks.

It hurts the single mom working two jobs who can’t take three unpaid days off to drive six hours to a surgical clinic because her state shut every closer option down. It hurts the teenager in a small town who can’t risk being seen walking into the only clinic in the county. It hurts people in abusive relationships who cannot safely explain why they need to “run errands” three days in a row.

Medication abortion is how those people get care. That is exactly why Republicans are trying so hard to kill it.

Josh Hawley is not confused about any of this. He knows mifepristone is now used in roughly two-thirds of abortions. He knows the Supreme Court left the FDA’s approval standing. He knows voters have punished his party over abortion bans again and again since Roe fell.

His answer is not to listen. It is to double down — to ban the pill, overrule the experts, and tell the rest of us he’s doing it to “protect women.”

For the first time since ProPublica reported on preventable deaths of pregnant women under Texas’ abortion ban, the state’s medical board has disciplined doctors in those cases.

Read our full story: https://propub.li/4cVBVVN

gimmesometruth27 said:

mickeyrat said:

must not be draconian enough if alito stayed it.