Republican AGs say abortion pills should be restricted because they cause population loss

Three Republican state attorneys general have renewed efforts to limit access to medical abortionand their latest legal move involves an utterly absurd justification for their anti-abortion pill campaign.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Idaho Attorney General Raoul Labrador filed the amendments complaint earlier this month, which is seeking to force the Federal Drug Administration to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone, one of two pills needed to induce an abortion. The revised filing was filed after the US Supreme Court led June that the original plaintiffs, a group of doctors and anti-abortion groups, lacked standing to sue, in part because they failed to show how they were harmed or might be harmed by the FDA’s expansion of access to medical abortion.

In the complaint, the attorneys general argue that expanding access to the abortion pill poses potential harm to their states because it leads to lower birth rates, including among teenagers.

“This is sovereign damage to the state in itself,” the complaint says.

Declining birth rates, it added, also lead to “further injuries” such as “reduced political representation” and “loss of federal funds” due to population decline.

“Defendants’ actions cause a loss of potential population or a potential increase in population,” the plaintiffs say. “Each abortion means at least one potential or actual birth lost.”

Overall, the complaint describes mifepristone as a very dangerous drug, contradicting decades of research showing that the abortion pill is safe and effective. According to the FDAof the approximately 5.9 million women who took mifepristone for abortion between September 2000 and December 2022, there were 32 deaths, although the agency noted that these deaths “cannot be definitely linked to mifepristone” because of other illnesses they may have had.

But the argument that the abortion pill leads to “loss of potential population” is particularly egregious. By arguing that restricting access to abortion is a valid means of increasing the state’s population—and by arguing that that interest trumps the individual liberty of the pregnant person—the attorneys general reduce pregnant people to nothing more than a means by which the state increases its political representation and federal funding.

Conservatives have fought for decades to legislate that their belief in life at conception trumps the right to make decisions about one’s own body. This argument, however, dispels any pretense that the personal freedom of a pregnant person matters at all.