Mississippi lawmakers have sent a bill to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves that would criminalize distribution of abortion-inducing medication in the state, punishable by up to 10 years in prison if convicted, according to the bill’s terms as described with the legislation’s passage. The measure was added to a drug trafficking bill and approved by lawmakers Tuesday, moving to the governor for consideration.
The House and Senate both voted to advance the revised drug trafficking bill after Republican lawmakers added abortion-related restrictions on abortion-inducing drugs. The bill passed the House 76-38 and the Senate 37-15, with Republicans controlling both chambers, the AP report said.
Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Democrat from Jackson who voted against the bill, criticized what she said the legislation would do to patients and others trying to access abortion-related autonomy. “I think we’re going to end up trapping a lot of people into the criminal justice system simply because they want to have autonomy over their own bodies,” Summers said.
Rep. Celeste Hurst, a Republican from Sandhill, introduced the amendment, her goal described as keeping abortion medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol from entering Mississippi. Hurst told Mississippi Today that, “The intent is to keep doctors from out of state from circumventing our current law,” in remarks carried in the AP story.
Mary Ziegler, an abortion-law expert and professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said criminalizing abortion-inducing medication could lock up people seeking care and could also discourage doctors from prescribing the drugs in clinical settings for other non-abortion purposes. In remarks carried in the AP story, Ziegler said the state’s approach could be especially harmful because of how vague it is, including on language about intent and clinical uses.
Ziegler said the bill’s intent requirement would be hard to prove and could still allow prosecutions in situations involving people using the drugs for their own purposes. She said, “the differentiator is intent, which is really, really hard to prove.” The AP report said the bill’s possession would be criminal only if tied to an intent to distribute, but Ziegler expected Mississippians using the drugs for their own purposes could still face prosecution.
The AP report also described uncertainty tied to clinical-care exemptions. The bill said Mississippi providers would be prosecuted only if they prescribed abortion-inducing medication with the intent to cause an abortion, not when the drugs are prescribed to aid a miscarriage or stop hemorrhaging. Ziegler said that even with those exemptions, the provisions could still chill health care, telling Mississippi Today that the “differentiator is intent, which is really, really hard to prove.”
On enforcement outside the state, Ziegler said shield laws in states where abortion is legal could protect abortion providers, patients and helpers from out-of-state investigations, lawsuits and prosecutions tied to mailing or other cross-border conduct. She said lawmakers appeared to be imagining prosecutions aimed at doctors or drug manufacturers in “blue states,” while warning it would be more difficult to get providers into court than to reach someone whose partner has the drugs, adding that “it will be much harder for prosecutors to actually get those people into court than it will be for them to get someone whose partner has these drugs.”
Sen. Daniel Sparks, a Republican from Belmont and one of six lawmakers who worked on the final details, supported the amendment as a way to enforce Mississippi’s abortion ban, according to the AP report. Sparks said, “The state of Mississippi has been pretty clear of where they are about their pro-life position,” and that if people were “circumventing that through the mail or through other mechanisms, then I think we’re trying to be consistent with what the law is.”
A dissenting lawmaker, Sen. Bradford Blackmon, a Democrat from Canton, said the approach was “outrageous,” “ridiculous” and “unnecessary,” and criticized the decision to lump abortion medication into scheduled-drug rules that could lead to imprisonment from one to 10 years. Blackmon said it would “hurt poor women,” and argued that “The wealthy Mississippians are still going to be able to go where they want to get abortions.”
The AP report noted that the policy debate follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned constitutional protections for abortion rights in a Mississippi case. It also said Ziegler argued that abortion access via mail-in medication has contributed to increases in abortions nationwide since Dobbs, and that abortion opponents’ efforts could fail to reduce abortion numbers while increasing legal risk for patients and clinicians.