INDIANAPOLIS (LifeSiteNews) — The Indiana Senate has voted 35-10 to pass legislation to crack down on the distribution of abortion pills in the pro-life state, to counteract their undermining of Indiana’s legal protection for preborn babies.
According to its official legislative summary, SB 236 would make anyone “who manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides an abortion inducing drug…jointly and severally liable for: (1) the wrongful death of an unborn child or pregnant woman from the use of an abortion inducing drug; and (2) personal injury of an unborn child or pregnant woman from the use of the abortion inducing drug.” It would allow wrongful death lawsuits to be brought by either the mother or father of a preborn child killed via abortion-inducing drugs.
The bill next moves to the Indiana House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a 40-seat advantage and where it is unlikely to have trouble reaching Republican Gov. Mike Braun’s desk for a signature.
“In this state, as a pro-life state, it is a public interest if someone is violating these laws,” said Republican state Sen. Liz Brown, one of the bill’s co-authors. “If there’s a prescriber, or someone grabbing these pills or these, you know, sort of the wild wild west online of abortion pill providers, we can go after them, if we can find them.”
In December, the Indiana Department of Health’s Division of Vital Records released a report shows that 42 abortions occurred in the third quarter of 2025, compared to 41 in the same quarter the year before. The number represents a 98 percent drop in abortions from before full enforcement of the state’s pro-life laws, which ban most abortions throughout pregnancy with exceptions for rape or incest in the first 10 weeks, fetal anomalies “incompatible with sustained life” up to 20 weeks, or “medical emergencies.” The law also requires medical care for any babies who survive attempted abortions.
The report showed the law’s high effectiveness at stopping surgical abortions, while also highlighting the preborn lives that continue to be sacrificed under the law’s exceptions. It also did not reveal how many illegal abortions go unreported due to the use of abortion pills mailed into the state, which cannot be identified coming in and can be taken in private. The untraceable nature of such abortions makes state-level bans on using abortion pills effectively extremely difficult to enforce, unless and until enforcement of the federal Comstock Act, which forbids distributing abortion-inducing drugs by mail, is restored.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
Questions are currently swirling over when and how the Trump administration will handle the problem. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to weaken the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that he would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.
Pro-lifers were given hope in May that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who “moderated” during his own presidential bid) promised in May a “complete review” of the harms of abortion pills, though no conclusions or timetable have since been announced. But some pro-life leaders have recently called for the firing of U.S. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over reports he is intentionally “slow walking” the review, which Makary denies.