#medication-abortion

#medication-abortion

Two amendments were ultimately added to the bill following the debate on the House floor: One would threaten up to life in prison for giving abortion pills to a pregnant person without their knowledge. (Administering drugs without consent is already a crime, but this amendment dramatically escalates the penalty.) The other makes it illegal to raise funds or distribute money to buy abortion pills, potentially destroying the crucial and life-saving work of abortion funds.

When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.

Nearly 200 anti-abortion bills have been introduced in 29 states, according to an estimate by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization. "In 2026, medication abortion remains one of the central battlegrounds in the fight over reproductive autonomy, with policymakers in several states pushing bills that would criminalize patients, restrict telehealth and mailing, and even misclassify abortion pills as controlled substances or environmental hazards," Kimya Forouzan, Guttmacher's principal policy adviser for state issues, said in a statement.

A California bill that would allow health care providers to anonymously mail abortion drugs could soon become law, marking the latest effort by a blue state to safeguard access to medication abortion. The two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol is used in more than 60% of abortions in the U.S., and roughly a quarter of abortions are now done via telehealth, according to the Society of Family Planning.