Why Senator Hawley’s Abortion Pill Regulation Falls Short
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley announced yesterday that he has filed the “Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act,” which would remove FDA approval of mifepristone for abortions and allow women who use mifepristone to file lawsuits against abortion providers.
While we commend Senator Hawley for his desire to save preborn babies, there are a number of moral and practical problems with legislation that focuses solely on banning mifepristone, and with the rhetoric used to support this effort.
God requires that civil authorities recognize abortion as murder, and that our laws refrain from showing partiality by treating some lives as more valuable than others. By withholding equal protection of the laws from preborn babies, this effort falls short of the protections for human life mandated by the Bible and the United States Constitution.
The use of mifepristone is not required for self-induced abortion. While both mifepristone and misoprostol are used for many self-induced abortions in the United States, abortions using misoprostol alone are already common elsewhere in the world. There are also herbal tinctures and other emergent methods of self-induced abortion that do not require the use of any abortion-inducing drugs.
Only banning one specific method of abortion merely encourages other methods of abortion, failing to reduce abortion numbers in any meaningful sense. Just as the overturn of Roe v. Wade prompted the abortion industry to quickly pivot toward abortion-inducing drugs, restricting the access of abortion-inducing drugs will simply lead abortion providers to pioneer new methods.
Any strategy toward reducing the use of abortion pills that centers on lawsuits against domestic abortion providers fails to account for overseas supply chains of abortion pills. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, many women turned to ordering abortion pills directly from the foreign countries where they are manufactured, and this legislation would not hold such providers accountable.
The rhetoric used in this campaign to restrict mifepristone largely downplays the reality that abortion is the murder of preborn babies. The very title of the legislation, and the Pro-Life establishment groups messaging in support of the effort, cast the woman as a second victim of abortion and center primarily on abusive male partners coercing women into abortions. While some women are indeed forced into abortion, most women who have self-induced abortions are willful participants, and the sole victims of most abortions are the murdered preborn babies.
The laws against abortion should not focus on making abortion safer for women. The concern of our laws should be establishing justice and deterring evil conduct, not making such conduct safer for perpetrators to commit. Because women are willful participants in the vast majority of self-induced abortions, this legislation and the underlying rhetoric introduce moral confusion and distract from the reality that preborn babies are the victims of abortion.
Instead of proposing morally incoherent and practically ineffective legislation like the “Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act,” our civil authorities should seek to abolish abortion, ensuring that preborn babies enjoy the equal protection of our laws against murder.