Alabama’s attorney general confirmed what many abortion rights advocates have warned for years: Women can be prosecuted for using medication abortion, despite the state’s abortion ban explicitly stating it does not criminalize the pregnant person.
A spokesperson for state Attorney General Steve Marshall told the conservative outlet 1819 News last week that although Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, the Human Life Protection Act, does not penalize a pregnant woman seeking an illegal abortion, he plans to rely on an older law to prosecute people seeking abortion care in the state.
“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law,” a spokesperson for Marshall told the conservative outlet, and first flagged by feminist writer Jessica Valenti.
“It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law — which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children,” the spokesperson added. Marshall’s office did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Alabama’s chemical endangerment law was first passed in 2006 to protect children from dangerous fumes and chemicals found in home-based meth labs. Not long after, district attorneys started applying the law to drug-using pregnant women, despite the law including nothing about fetuses. Prosecutors stretched the interpretation of the law, reasoning that a fetus is a child, and by ingesting drugs, the pregnant person is bringing chemical harm to the so-called child. As a result, the law has been used to criminalize hundreds of pregnant people when they test positive for a drug or medication.
And now Marshall plans to stretch that interpretation further to include pregnant people taking abortion pills, the combination of two safe and FDA-approved drugs called misoprostol and mifepristone.
Although medication abortion is still legal on the federal level — and the FDA recently expanded access — it’s illegal for any Alabama-based physician to prescribe abortion pills in the state under Alabama’s near-total ban. The current ban only includes exceptions for the pregnant person’s life and threatens physicians with felony charges and up to 99 years in prison for providing abortion care. Based on this, Marshall seems to reason that abortion pills are illegal substances in Alabama,…
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