Both sides of the aisle were heated about the issue of women being coerced into medicated abortion during a nearly two-hour-long Senate hearing on Wednesday about the safety of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol.
While the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing was initially supposed to focus on the long-awaited safety review from the Food and Drug Administration on the abortion pills, the event became mainly a referendum on the availability of abortion pills online opening the door for partners in abusive relationships, sex traffickers, or abusive parents to coerce pregnant women and girls into unwanted abortions.
Anti-abortion advocates have argued for years that the FDA’s decision in 2021 to remove in-person screening requirements to obtain mifepristone has endangered women even in states that have outlawed or significantly curtailed abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican and a GOP witness, told the committee of her experience prosecuting a criminal case against a New York physician who prescribed abortion pills to a pregnant Louisiana minor. The minor’s mother ordered mifepristone and misoprostol online and coerced her daughter into an abortion.
Murrill said that the 16-year-old was 20 weeks pregnant when her mother coerced her into an abortion, which is well beyond the 10-week gestational age limit set by the FDA as safe for medication abortion.
Murrill told the committee that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) has refused to extradite the physician involved in the criminal case. California has also refused to extradite to Louisiana a different physician involved in a similar criminal abortion-related case.
Both California and New York have so-called shield laws intended to prevent the extradition of healthcare professionals who prescribe abortion pills online to states where abortion is prohibited or heavily restricted.
“Shield laws in some states protect providers from liability and effectively nullify laws in our states, their purpose is to make it more difficult to sue or prosecute individuals in those states where abortion drugs are prohibited, they also make it more difficult for women coerced into abortion, taking abortion drugs to bring their abusers to justice,” Murrill said.
Senators share abortion coercion stories
Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who lived in foster care before he was adopted, said during his questioning period that his biological mother was pressured by his biological father to have an abortion, which she refused.
Husted said the topic of the hearing made him “think about the world we live in today with drugs like mifepristone and wonder if it existed then, would the outcome for [him] have been different.”
“I would like to think that my birth mother would have still chosen to have an adoption, but I’ve seen some of the horrors of men who are trying to use the drug to end pregnancies against the will of the woman that they give the drug to,” said Husted.
Husted went on to describe two cases of abortion coercion in Ohio, including one in which a male physician forced abortion pills down the throat of his lover after she refused to consume a laced drink he had prepared for her.
Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) shared several stories of her time as a judge in Florida and as the state’s attorney general, dealing with coerced abortion using mifepristone.
Moody described a case during her attorney general tenure in which a woman obtained abortion pills online out of state “as part of a plot to kill her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s child in the womb.”
She went on to describe another case she handled as a judge in which a man “got an abortion drug, put a different label on the bottle, [and] labeled it as an antibiotic” to trick his former partner into an abortion.
Moody and Hawley: ‘Can men get pregnant?’
After multiple stories of men procuring abortion pills to coerce pregnant women and teenagers into abortion, Moody asked Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN witness called by the minority, “Can men get pregnant?”
Moody said during her questioning that one of her staff members attempted to procure mifepristone and misoprostol using the name “Michael” and was able to make it to the final stage of ordering the medication on an abortion drug telehealth website, illustrating that abusive men can easily obtain abortion pills for nefarious purposes.
Because Verma did not initially answer Moody’s question, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) assertively questioned her as to whether biological men can get pregnant and ought to be able to obtain abortion pills.
Verma responded to Hawley’s initial question by saying that in her Massachusetts practice, she cares for “people with many identities,” saying that Hawley’s line of questioning was “polarizing.”
“It is not polarizing to say that women are a biological reality and should be treated and protected as such; that is not polarizing. That is truth,” said Hawley.
Democrats say mifepristone restriction is not the answer to stop coercion
Sen. Tim Kane (D-VA) said that “coercion is awful” and “should be prosecuted,” but that restricting access to mifepristone through in-person screening requirements places unnecessary burdens on women who voluntarily choose abortion.
“It seems to me that, like, the opposite of coercion is choice. If we’re against coercion, why would [we] be anti-choice?” said Kane.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said that women have been the victims of violence due to pregnancy for millennia, having nothing to do with abortion pills.
“The murder rate, the assault rate on pregnant women by their partners to end a pregnancy has been a long-standing part of human history, so to blame it on mifepristone misses the point,” said Hassan.
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Hassan said that she had a miscarriage at 12 weeks pregnant, highlighting the point that acknowledging the complexity of women’s reproductive healthcare should be bipartisan.
“When I had a miscarriage at 12 weeks, it was painful, and it was hard, and it was emotional, and mifepristone had nothing to do with it,” Hassan said, clarifying that she had a dilation and curettage procedure.
