A cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation are suing the federal government to limit access to mifepristone, one of the pills used to induce an abortion—but an underlying reason behind the suit is perhaps one of the most insidious anti-abortion initiatives yet.
Mifepristone, combined with misoprostol, composes the two-step prescription referred to as “the abortion pill.” The procedure accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits.
The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.
But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.
“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.
And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.
“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.
The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.
By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.
