Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill May 19 making abortion pill trafficking a felony offense in the state, with the legislation’s sponsors saying the measure is intended to protect women from coercion and from taking the drugs without medical oversight.
Under the law, those who knowingly possess or distribute the drugs with the intention of procuring an abortion — which is already illegal in nearly all circumstances in Oklahoma — may be charged with a felony offense. Convictions carry up to 10 years in prison, fines up to $100,000, or both, according to a press release from the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
The law only applies to those attempting to distribute the drugs to others, not to women seeking the drugs for themselves. It also does not affect contraceptives, in vitro fertilization, or the legal manufacture and sale of pharmaceuticals.
Republican Rep. Denise Crosswhite Hader, the bill’s author, stated in the release that since the pro-life laws went into effect, abortion drug trafficking has increasingly targeted pregnant women.
“These women are already in a vulnerable state,” she said, arguing that those who profit from distributing the pills are taking advantage of women. She also raised concerns that women are being administered the drugs without a medical professional’s advice, causing “horrible side effects.”
Crosswhite Hader also said that trafficking abortion pills forces women to take the drugs alone and deal with the abortion process without medical help. She added that two pills are needed for a complete abortion, but the second drug — the one that expels the unborn baby from its mother — is sometimes administered by itself, heightening the risk of danger to women.
“I'm concerned that a woman given these drugs could die by herself, and they could keep her from being able to carry to term a pregnancy at a later date should that be desired," Crosswhite Hader said.
Republican Sen. David Bullard, the author of the Senate version of the bill, called abortion pill trafficking “the largest killer of babies and the greatest threat to motherhood.”
“It is the death sentence to an innocent baby who has been convicted of no crime and a false hope to a mother, soon to kill the child she carries,” he said, adding that the trafficking has caused “a generational loss of Holocaust proportions.”