JACKSON, Mississippi (LifeSiteNews) – The Mississippi Legislature gave final approval to legislation to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills as a felony drug trafficking offense.
House Bill 1613, originally intended to penalize individuals possessing 200 or more grams of illegal drugs, was amended to also criminalize those who “create, sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute, dispense, prescribe or possess with intent to create, sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute, dispense or prescribe” any “medicine, drug or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman to cause the death of the unborn child” without an in-person doctor visit. It passed the state Senate 77-39 in February.
The final version passed the state House 76-38 and the Senate 37-15 on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported, and now awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves to become law. Reeves is pro-life and expected to sign. Abortions are illegal in Mississippi except for cases of rape or medical threats to a mother’s life (in which abortion is not medically necessary anyway).
“The intent is to keep doctors from out of state from circumventing our current law,” said Republican state Rep. Celeste Hurst, who introduced the amendment to cover abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol.
“The state of Mississippi has been pretty clear of where they are about their pro-life position,” Republican state Sen. Daniel Sparks added. “If people are circumventing that through the mail or through other mechanisms, then I think we’re trying to be consistent with what the law is.”
Mailing abortion-inducing drugs across state lines has become the abortion lobby’s most important tool for perpetuating abortion-on-demand and undermining pro-life laws, thanks to the difficulty of tracking pills shipped in nondescript packaging and pills usually taken in complete privacy.
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 abortions in the most recent reporting period. According to Lozier Institute pro-life researcher 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.”
The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, that Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills.
This flood was unleashed by former President Joe Biden, who, after the fall of Roe, instituted rule changes allowing abortion pills to be dispensed without an in-person doctor’s visit and choosing not to enforce federal law against mailing them across state lines. However, during his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump declared he would not reverse that decision. Pro-lifers were given hope in May 2025 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 a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.
But no conclusions or timetable have since been announced, prompting frustration among pro-lifers, which has only intensified with the federal government’s attempts to quash pro-life lawsuits against the FDA’s permissive abortion pill rules.