I don’t pay much attention to crime stories in far-off states — there’s plenty of that in Louisiana to keep us all occupied — but an article from The Boston Globe last week caught my eye.
A Massachusetts man was arrested for slipping his pregnant girlfriend some pills he claimed to be iron and vitamins, but authorities believe one of them was actually Misoprostol, one of two medications sometimes used in a regimen to induce abortion. The woman suffered a miscarriage, and the man faces charges that include poisoning, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
If that horrific scenario sounds familiar to people in Louisiana, it’s likely because the Louisiana Legislature just passed a law inspired by a similar case, this one involving the sister of state Sen. Thomas Pressly R-Shreveport, in Texas. She did not lose her pregnancy, thankfully, but her daughter was born 10 weeks early and has lingering issues. Her husband pleaded guilty to injuring a child and assaulting a pregnant person and served six months in prison, a sentence the senator’s sister believes, fairly, was inadequate.
Pressly’s bill at first aimed to spell out harsh punishment for such crimes in Louisiana, which was easy to justify even if they might be covered by existing statutes like those in Massachusetts. In fact, “all 105 of us would have voted for it” said state Rep. Aimee Adatto Freeman, D-New Orleans, who instead wound up sending up alarms against a revised version of the bill.
There’s even a more specific law on the books here, as Freeman pointed out on the House floor; it was passed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, and it already attaches tough penalties to the use of the drugs in question for abortion.
But rather than leave a noncontroversial idea alone, anti-abortion forces slipped in an unrelated amendment labeling Misoprostol and Mifepristone as controlled substances, a categorization used for drugs that are addictive — even though these drugs are not.
Proponents of the law — including Pressly, who happily adopted the amendment as his own — say it’s all part of going after bad actors, and that people with legitimate reason to use these drugs can still get them by prescription. In other words, no big deal, right?
Wrong.
According to many doctors and doctors-in-training across multiple specialties in Louisiana — 280 of whom signed a letter pleading with lawmakers to reject the reclassification — the new law that Gov. Jeff Landry eagerly signed is bad for patients in general.
Dr. Jennifer Avegno, an emergency room doctor and New Orleans Health Department director, warned of both direct and indirect fallout.
A direct effect is that there are now more barriers to getting prescriptions for these drugs, including requirements that prescribers have special licenses and that prescriptions usually be on paper, not electronic.
Then there are the indirect effects. The new classification is bound to add to the confusion that already exists due to Louisiana’s harsh anti-abortion laws, which doctors say have left patients unsure about what they can do or even discuss with their health care providers.
“When we call these drugs dangerous, it’s not going to make that any more clear,” she said.
In this politically charged environment, she added, doctors and patients must now worry that their prescriptions are being tracked by the state.
And then there's the fact that these medications just do not present the type of public hazard that the controlled classification covers.
“If legislators aren’t going to use medical science for this medical list, that’s a really dangerous precedent,” Avegno said. “It leaves the door open to say ‘I don’t like drug x,’ so it will have some connotation in the public mind that it’s dangerous.”
Dr. Neelima Sukhavasi, an OB-GYN in Baton Rouge, also worries about imposing a “stigma” on drugs that are “very, very commonly” used to insert IUDs, treat miscarriages, induce pregnancy and treat hemorrhaging after delivery.
And she worries that it will exacerbate challenges doctors have already seen since Roe v. Wade was overturned two years ago, including difficulty getting prescriptions filled because pharmacists fear crossing a legal line.
“I just don’t understand why safe parts of health care are being attacked as part of this,” Sukhavasi said. “I worry about the downstream effects that maybe weren’t thought of before passing this.”
Which makes you wonder just what the people who passed it were thinking.
Officials championing the bill invariably point back to the horror that Pressly’s sister endured. Yet their insistence on brushing off concerns about the effect of reclassifying drugs goes to the larger pattern since the court took away the right to legal abortion. Like a number of other post-Roe Louisiana laws, this one substitutes politics for science, tags doctors as potential criminals and puts a general chill over reproductive care.
It may or may not be needed to address crimes like the one that inspired it, but it surely will have at least one real-world effect, Avegno and other practitioners warn.
“If you want to live in a place that does not have the doctors needed” to care for the population, she said, “then we’re heading the right direction.”