WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Protecting Women: The Louisiana Bill on Abortion Pill Access

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Many oppose the new Louisiana Bill on Abortion Pills as restrictive and illogical. The details of the bill, however, reveal just how logical and beneficial the bill is. In this episode, Michaela addresses bias and fact in her discussion of abortion pill policies and practices.

Hello and welcome back to Strength and Dignity. This is Michaela Estreth and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Today I'm going to dive right in and talk about an article that was published on Ms. Magazine a couple of weeks ago on May 24th, 2024. This article addresses the recent passing of a bill in Louisiana that reclassified the abortion pills as controlled substances, which makes, these substances much, much more difficult to access. And of course, this author on Ms. Magazine is completely outraged about this and basically accuses right-wing conservatives or anyone who is pro-life as being liars and ignoring the data and basically just trying to get their way because of what they believe about abortion instead of the outright facts.

So we're going to dive into the article. Look at what she says. This is written by Jill Philipovic, and the title of the article on Ms. Magazine's website is, To win, they have to lie, while Louisiana is reclassifying safe abortion pills as dangerous, controlled substances. So she already indicates that she believes the abortion pills are safe, and they're being reclassified as dangerous controlled substances, and therefore it's a lie. This is her lead, what she starts out saying. She says, The Republican-dominated Louisiana state government is on the verge of reclassifying Mipidicin and Misoprotozole

to abortion-inducing medications as Schedule for Drugs, a categorization reserved for drugs that may cause addiction or abuse. Abortion pills are a lot of things, highly effective, often life-saving, and of course, controversial. But they are not addictive, nor prone to being abused. No one is taking recreational abortion drugs. No one is addicted to abortion pills. So that's her main lead at the beginning, basically saying, scheduled for drugs are drugs that are meant for abuse or for addiction. And that's not what abortion pills are used for or ever in danger

of becoming used for. And therefore, why are they being classified as this? And if you don't understand the full conversation, if you don't read and educate on what the bill is doing and what the purpose behind the bill is and all of the details in that bill, which we'll go into, her argument makes somewhat sense at first. It's like, well, yeah, how could you be addicted to an abortion pill? But the point is not that the pills are addictive. The point of reclassification is to make a drug harder to get. So the categories do have certain drugs in them that are addictive or are abused, but the Schedule 4 category just means it's a harder drug to access. So reclassification. So, reclassification, classifying this drug as Schedule 4 isn't because it's addictive and therefore it has to be in

Scheduled 4. It's in order to make it harder to access. That's the purpose. And an article published on Reuters explains a little bit about what the bill did. When I'm quoting from this article, it was written before the governor of Louisiana signed the bill so it hadn't fully gone into effect. So it's talking hypothetically. But the bill is in effect. The governor did sign it. And so on Reuters, it says, the bill would make unprescribed possession of abortion pills Miffipritzone and Mizoprotozole a crime punishable by one to five years in prison

and fines of up to $5,000, though pregnant women are expressly exempt from prosecution. Okay, so that's one point that I really wanted to clarify that this author from Ms. Magazine, Jill Filippovic, never addressed. She never talked about it. And the point is that

pregnant women who are in possession of these pills are exempt from consequences of federal imprisonment or fining. And so the purpose of this reclassification is A to make it harder to get, but also it's not to persecute women. It's actually to protect them. And we'll go into that more in a little bit. But they are prosecuting people who possess this drug who are not pregnant women. And the drug is only meant for pregnant women, right? Like, you can only take an abortion pill drug if you are a pregnant woman that, like, is by definition what the drug does. And so therefore, this means that people are possessing these drugs and giving them to pregnant women, putting them unknown to the pregnant women in their drinks, in their food. And they literally cited someone who did

this. And it's happened to other people as well. And so this is a safety measure. for pregnant women. So it's to protect pregnant women saying you are exempt from punishment by possessing these drugs because only pregnant women should be able to access them through a prescription from their doctor. So they're hard to access, but they're not impossible to access. They just require a prescription from their doctor. Kind of like before recreational marijuana was legalized, marijuana used to be a drug that was meant for high pain. It had to be prescribed for, by a doctor after an intense surgery or for pain medication instead of just accessed on the street. And that's another tangent to talk about.

But the point is that this bill is meant to protect pregnant women so that only they can access these pills through the right means of prescription from their doctor who says, yes, I give this to you and you're allowed to use this. So that's one big point that needs to be clarified that the author of Ms. Magazine never addressed. Continuing on the article on Reuters, it says, The drug classification provisions were added as an amendment to a larger bill outlawing coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud, making it a crime for abortion-inducing medication to be administered to an unsuspecting pregnant woman without her consent.

So that's in the article itself, basically what I just said, saying that there have been cases in the past that they're trying to remedy and protect people from, where maybe a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, a husband, a family member, someone says, I don't want you to have this baby. This is going to be much harder for us than we want. And the woman says, no, I want to have the baby. And so then after she stands your ground and says, no, I'm keeping this baby, family members, boyfriend, husband, whoever it is, decides to try to induce a miscarriage, basically, in her

and to make her body get rid of the child through these abortion pills without her knowing. So again, this is a protection of women to keep them from being in that circumstance. Continuing on the article on Routers, so not Ms. Magazine, but another article that clarified some of these issues, it classifies Louisiana as an extremely conservative state when it comes to abortion. So it says, Louisiana has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation prohibiting the voluntary termination of pregnancy through surgical means or medication, except when necessary to protect the life of the mother. Good for Louisiana, as it ought to be.

Abortion is taking the life of a child. It should be outlawed. The entire my body, my choice, is a complete lie and a complete twist of what is actually going on. And so for the woman on Ms. Magazine to say that the conservatives are the one who are lying about these pills being harmful, and we'll get even more into that. But in a way the pills are harmful, they are killing a child and forcing a miscarriage, which is a harmful thing to do. And so Louisiana is one of the most pro-women states I know because they're actually defending women. And their body's biological processes, they're the right to life, the protection of a child, and the fact that life is life from the moment of conception.

Okay, lastly from this article on Reuters, it says supporters of the reclassification say it's intended to curtail distribution of the pills for illicit uses, such as coerced medication abortions, that the thrust of the bill is aimed at preventing. So again, that's just a summary of what we've been saying, meaning this bill is not anti-women, it's actually pro-women. It said that pregnant women in possession of these pills would not be prosecuted, that they are exempt from this law, and that they are actually the ones being. protected so that they do not endure someone giving them these pills unknown to them. It keeps people who are not pregnant women from possessing these pills because why would they need them? So that's the point of the bill. And CNN reported a tweet or I guess a post on X from the governor of Louisiana.

And he said, requiring an abortion-inducing drug to be obtained with a prescription and criminalizing the use of an abortion drug on an unsuspecting mother is nothing short of common sense. This bill protects women across Louisiana and I was proud to sign this bill into law today. So the governor of Louisiana deserves praise and recognition for what he signed and his defense of this because he says it in his own words that it's common sense that this bill protects women, that it's supposed to defend them and actually aid. them instead of what many people, and especially the author on Ms. Magazine, is arguing that it's a lie, that it's false, that it's actually harming women and restricting them and punishing them,

all of those victim words, as I like to say. And then the last thing that I'll add about this coverage of what the bill does that CNN noted is not only are pregnant women exempt from these prosecutions. but also Louisiana doctors are permitted to, under the law, prescribe the drugs. So it's not like if you're a doctor or an office and you have the drugs and you prescribe them. That's illegal. That's not the case. This bill is making it so only pregnant women can get them and only doctors can prescribe them.

That's the point. So it's basically limiting the market, if you want to talk about it as like economics, it's limiting the market to the people who actually need them. No one else should be buying them. If you're just tuning in, thanks for joining. You're listening to Strength and Dignity, and I'm Michaela Estreuth. Today, we're talking about the recent bill from Louisiana that was passed that reclassified the abortion drugs Mepiphrone and mesoprotozole into a scheduled for drug classification,

making them much harder to access. We're discussing the articles on this, what the bill actually did, and why. Okay, so now let's dive in to. what the drugs actually do because this author on Ms. Magazine, she was trying to prove that these drugs are completely harmless and so she cited

this New York Times article about how these pills are extremely safe and less dangerous than Tylenol is what they often say. What the author Jill Philopovic says is, the truth is that abortion bills are overwhelmingly safe.

Abortion opponents don't like abortion bills because abortion pills cause abortions, not because abortion pills are dangerous. Well, again, that depends on how you define dangerous, because I would say that murder is more than dangerous. It's actually wrong. But also, it is dangerous. It's dangerous to the child who is being deprived of the nutrients than it needs and then being dispelled from the woman's body. Basically what the abortion pill does. So when a pregnant woman takes Miffitpritsone, it cuts off her hormone. supply of progester to the child, which is necessary for the development and the safety of the child.

So first, it basically starves the child and cuts off the supply of nutrients and hormones for the child to grow. And then the second drug, because it's a two-pilled drug, misoprotazole, that causes the woman's uterus to start contracting as if it's going to dispel a child, as if it's forcing a miscarriage, basically, and forcing. the now child who is no longer living because it's been cut off from all the hormonal and nutritional supplies that it needs in order to grow and stay alive inside its mother. It's now being dispelled through basically like a contraction of the uterus. Okay, so in what I just said, but in, I guess, a more medical wording, I can quote from CNN article

which says, in a medication abortion, Mipipidzone blocks the hormone progesterine, which is needed for a pregnancy to continue. Mizoprotazole is then taken within the next 24 to 48 hours. Misoprotazole causes the uterus to contract, causing cramping and bleeding. And so when this woman says they are not dangerous that these pills are overwhelmingly safe, and then she cites this New York Times article. And in the New York Times research article that basically surveyed and researched a lot of women who took medication abortions and then classified how high risk are these. So in this article, it says almost all patients will experience bleeding and pain during a medication abortion

because the pills essentially trigger a miscarriage. So on the words of the New York Times article, not just mine saying this is basically a miscarriage, it is a medical miscarriage. Like you are forcing a woman to have a miscarriage. So here's a thing. A miscarriage is not a good thing. It's not a normal process. The horrid sadness of this is that sometimes women do have miscarriages.

And of course they don't want that. And that is the body's process of saying this child did not live. And so we need to get to remove this child from the uterus. But forcing a miscarriage is not a normal bodily process. But that's the thing is that medication is supposed to aid the body. it's supposed to help the body either like an antibiotic or a pain medication or, I mean, any medication that you can really think of is either supposed to reduce pain or is supposed to help the body in fighting off a virus, fighting off a disease. The point is that it's beneficial,

right? And this, these abortion drugs are doing the complete opposite. They are taking something that there's a normal function of the body, meaning the body is supplying this child with nutrients with hormones that it needs. And a woman's body knows how to do that. It's been programmed. It's been designed by God to sustain life. And then what these pills do is say, no, we're going to cut that off. We're going to change your body's normal process and actually force it to do something that it's not meant to do. And then it doesn't know what to do with. And so that, like, there's no ways that that's not dangerous is cutting off a normal human function. It's just mind-blowing to me. I mean, like, the best example is another hot topic, which is transgender surgeries. Like,

you are completely re-changing someone's body. Like, you're changing normal biology, right? That's on a different scope and in a different way. That's what you're doing is you're changing a biological process to, in order to control what you want to control. Then back to the, you know, the the fact that they trigger a miscarriage. Well, miscarriages themselves are dangerous and also they are extremely painful. Like, there's just hardly any other medication that you can think of that not only reverts a normal biological process, but also causes pain. The two things that medication is normally supposed to prevent is pain and is supposed to assist

the body. Okay, so here's another important clarification from the New York Times Reefat. research. So they have three categories of what denotes as serious complications. Okay. So mild complications typically resolve without medical intervention and they include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, headache, dizziness, fever, warmth, or chills. Okay, so that's mild. Moderate typically involves medical intervention at a patient's request or by necessity. So they list something like procedure needed after incomplete abortion, uterine infection needing antibiotics, and emergency room visits. So those three are moderate. Serious, they define as might cause permanent damage to health

without medical intervention. Hospitalization for serious complication, blood transfusion, infection requiring hospitalization, or even death. Okay, so serious complications are basically things that are unchangeable. Like you had such extreme complications that now you needed a blood transfusion. You had an extreme infection that required hospitalization. Maybe it made you infertile. Maybe it like harmed your uterus in some way or even death. Okay.

So that's what serious complications are. And then they say look at the numbers. Look at how low these are. I don't have the numbers off at the top of. that I had, but it's like less than 0.005% or something of women suffer from serious complications. Well, okay, but what about women who suffer from moderate complications? There was no research on that. Moderate complications include a procedure after an incomplete abortion, a infection needing

antibiotics, or a visit to the emergency room. And in the article, it even said, lots of women visit the emergency room after lots of days of heavy intense cramping and bleeding. And so they visit the emergency room because they're worried. And it's like, well, yeah, of course they do because that's not a normal thing to happen to a woman. And again, it's not normal to force your body into a miscarriage. And so this is dangerous.

It truly is dangerous. Like you're forcing your body to do something that it's not supposed to do. And it's going to be painful. And a lot of women are probably going to be very confused. very concerned. Okay, so to close with, again, the Ms. Magazine article from Jill Philopovic, she says, but abortion is wrong is an opinion. Abortion pills are dangerous is a false statement. The fact is that abortion pills are statistically extremely safe. The fact is inconvenient for people who want abortion pills banned. It's easier to make the case

for banning a medication if that medication is dangerous. Okay. So she's saying, again, they're lying because they're saying that abortion pills are dangerous when they're not. But again, like we did at the beginning, if you went to the bill and understood what the bill was doing, you would realize that they aren't reclassifying these drugs because the drugs are dangerous and need to be in a higher classification. They're reclassifying them to make them harder to access so that only a pregnant woman and a doctor can prescribe these to that pregnant woman. So therefore, the Louisiana state bill that was just passed is protecting women, is trying to keep them from being in hard situations in which they are giving these pills unknown to them. And also, I mentioned this earlier, but on all of the articles that I was researching, they said that the man behind drafting this bill did this because his, I believe it was his sister, experienced this, where her husband, I think. think it was, slipped abortion pills either into her drink or into her food without her knowing

because he didn't want her to have the child that they had conceived. So that's coming from a personal experience of the man who drafted this bill, but also it's happened more than once. That was not just a one case scenario. And it was in an effort to protect women and hopefully to save lives. So that's all I have for today. Thanks for listening to Strength and Dignity. I'm Michaela Estreuth, and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7.