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It could soon become difficult to access medications used for miscarriage management and to treat ectopic pregnancies because they are the same drugs used for abortion care.
Insider spoke to legal experts and reproductive health doctors in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion, which indicated the justices are poised to overturn the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that enshrines a woman's federal right to an abortion.
If Roe is, in fact, overturned, access to medications such as methotrexate and misoprostol could be harder to access, experts told Insider.
"The procedure that some people who miscarry get is the same procedure as abortion, same with the medications they take after," said Heather Shumaker, Director of State Abortion Access at the National Women's Law Center.
"Some people who have miscarriage management might have a similar regimen to the medication abortion regimen," she continued.
Dr. Natalie Crawford, a fertility doctor and obstetrician-gynecologist in Austin, said new laws are already having a chilling effect on access to the medication.
Texas recently passed an abortion ban that outlaws the procedure after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically about six weeks into pregnancy.
"We are finding some pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for these medications, citing SB8 as the reason why," Crawford told Insider.
She explained that ectopic pregnancies and incomplete miscarriages are non-viable pregnancies that can "result in maternal death and often be treated with medications that are also abortifacient" — meaning the drugs are used to terminate a pregnancy.
But miscarrying a pregnancy or having an ectopic pregnancy is unplanned, and often spontaneous, Seema Mohapatra, a law professor at the SMU Dedman School of Law told Insider.
She fears that more women will be unfairly criminally targeted for having a miscarriage, even though — unlike an abortion — miscarriages are beyond a woman's control.
