SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) — California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law on Friday to allow abortion drugs to be mailed without identifying a prescribing doctor or pharmacy on the label to shield facilitators from prosecution by pro-life states.
Assembly Bill 260 “would authorize a pharmacist to dispense mifepristone or other drug used for (chemical) abortion without the name of the patient, the name of the prescriber, or the name and address of the pharmacy, subject to specified requirements,” according to its legislative summary. Further, it “would prohibit the disclosure of the information to an individual or entity from another state.”
Newsom said the measure would “protect access to essential health care and shield patients and health care providers in the face of amplified attacks on the fundamental right to reproductive freedom.”
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, critics have warned that the law will make it much harder for states that ban abortions to identify the source of abortion pills illegally mailed from Canada to help circumvent the destination state’s pro-life laws.
“The trend of ultra-liberal, culture-of-death states passing legislation to allow abortionists to anonymously prescribe mifepristone began after the states of Louisiana and Texas sought justice for a minor who was coerced into taking mifepristone and ended up in the emergency room and a Texas mother who also landed in the emergency room after hemorrhaging following the use of mifepristone,” says Mary Szoch, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of abortion pills across state lines has become arguably the abortion lobby’s most effective tactic for preserving abortion “access” and are particularly problematic in pro-life states to which they can be sent and taken in complete privacy without any sign law enforcement can act on.
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
The abortion lobby pushes unsupervised pill use despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.” A recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” Catholic University of America research associate Michael New wrote. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.