(THE CENTER SQUARE) – Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) joined Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) and 18 other attorneys general in warning Walgreens and CVS pharmacies that any plans to mail abortion-inducing pills are illegal and unsafe.
“As the principal legal and law enforcement officers of our 20 states, we offer you these thoughts on the current legal landscape,” Bailey wrote.
In late January, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mifepristone for use in a regimen with misoprostol “to end an intrauterine pregnancy through 10 weeks gestation.” The drugs must be dispensed under the supervision of a certified prescriber or pharmacy and “may be dispensed in-person or by mail,” according to the FDA website.
In late December, the Department of Justice published a 21-page memorandum for the U.S. Postal Service that stated, “No matter where the drugs are delivered, a variety of uses of mifepristone and misoprostol serve important medical purposes and are lawful under federal and state law.” The document said the USPS could not assume that the drugs cannot be mailed because “they are being sent into a jurisdiction that significantly restricts abortion.”
CVS and Walgreens recently announced that they are seeking certification from the FDA to sell and mail the pills, according to multiple media reports.
“This is about the law, not politics,” Bethany McCorkle, a spokesperson for Yost, told Mount Vernon News. “The president is not a member of Congress and cannot repeal the ban on shipping abortion pills through the mail. Ohio signed on to this letter because businesses need to understand there may be consequences under state and federal law.”
Missouri became the first state to end elective abortions when a so-called trigger law was executed hours after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June. In addition to prohibiting doctors from performing abortions unless there is a medical emergency, Missouri law states that “any person who knowingly performs or induces an abortion of an unborn child in violation of this subsection shall be guilty of a class B felony, as well as subject to suspension or revocation of his or her professional license by his or her professional licensing board.”
Bailey’s letter to the companies stated that Missouri law prohibits “using the mail to send or receive abortion drugs.”
Bailey referred to research published by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSRH) which stated that medication abortions were 5.96 times as likely to result in a complication as first-trimester aspiration abortions. (When the Supreme Court ruled last June, ANSRH stated that the decision contradicted scientific evidence and said it “stands against this decision as one that will have devastating consequences to people’s lives and their families.”)
“And finally, mail-order abortion pills also invite the horror of an increase in coerced abortions,” Bailey wrote. “When abortion drugs are mailed or consumed outside [of] a regulated medical facility, the risk of coercion is much higher – indeed, guaranteed – because there is no oversight. Outside the regulated medical context, a person can obtain an abortion pill quite easily and then coerce a woman into taking it.”
Attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia signed Bailey’s letter.
