1). “Louisiana is set to make possessing abortion pills without a prescription punishable by up to 10 years in prison: It now heads to the desk of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who has not publicly weighed in on the legislation but is expected to sign it”, May 23, 2024, Megan Messerly, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
2). “Louisiana Legislature approves bill classifying abortion pills as controlled dangerous substances”, May 23, 2024, SARA CLINE, Associated Press (AP), at < https://apnews.com/article/
3). “The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear”, Mar 25, 2024, Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, at < https://slate.com/news-and-
4). “Texas doctor who said nine-year-olds can safely give birth appointed to maternal mortality committee: Dr Ingrid Skop called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade ‘a victory’ and has argued in favor of abortion bans”, May 23, 2024, Mary Tuma, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction: by dmorista: In a widely expected and dreaded development the Fascist dominated Louisiana State Legislature has now passed a law that would absurdly make both Mifepristone and Misoprostol schedule 4 dangerous drugs in the same category as Heroin. Of course, the reason that the fiercly forced-birth / forced-pregnancy members of that governmental body cite for this law is to “protect women and girls from the imaginary boogie man of the abortion industry”. Interestingly, pregnant women are exempt from prosecution and the new legal penalties of 10 years of prison and $100,000 fines that the fascist operatives on the Louisiana State Legislature have mandated for anybody who possesses these two drugs without a prescription. We can only expect that this will be a temporary respite as Louisiana is one of the states where legislators have proposed the death penalty for women who obtain abortions. Item 1)., “Louisiana is set to make ….”, and Item 2)., “Louisiana Legislature approves bill ….”, are both articles from May 23rd that report on this latest move to deny women access to needed Reproductive Health Care and Abortion Care.
Item 3). “The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear”, features an interesting background discussion of why the Forced-birth / Forced-pregnancy movement is now concentrating on the access to medication abortion, starting with women living in the Dark Ages Red States of the South, Midwest and Mountains. Dahlia Lithwick interviews “Carrie N. Baker, whose book, History and Politics of Abortion Pills in the United States, is being published by Amherst College Press this year.” It is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand what is actually going on.
There is a battle being waged over control of the statistics about maternal death rates and maternal harm rates. These harms will inevitably go up in places where; women are forced to bleed out in their cars in hospital parking lots, or who must return home until they are so sick from infections that even the crackpot forced-birth / forced-pregnancy laws of Texas and other such places allow for an abortion. Item 4)., “Texas doctor who said nine-year-olds can safely give birth ….” discusses the fact that Ingrid Skop a rabidly forced-birth / forced-pregnancy OB/GYB has been appointed to the “Texas maternal mortality and review committee”. This crackpot: “Skop – who has called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war” – has argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as nine or 10 to carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Skop told the House oversight committee in 2021.” (Emphasis added)
Jessica Valenti pointed out months ago that Texas and Idaho were both working to phony up the medical statistics to try to hide the large numbers of women who would be dying or would be terribly injured; due to the draconian forced-birth / forced-pregnancy policies that these two Fascist State Governments have imposed. This latest move in Texas proves just how right Valenti was.
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Louisiana is set to make possessing abortion pills without a prescription punishable by up to 10 years in prison
It now heads to the desk of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who has not publicly weighed in on the legislation but is expected to sign it.
The first-in-the-nation legislation could be a model for other red states grappling with how to stop their residents from traveling out of state to get abortion pills or ordering them online despite their abortion bans. | Charlie Riedel/AP
Louisiana lawmakers on Thursday approved legislation making the possession of abortion pills without a prescription a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
It now heads to the desk of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who has not publicly weighed in on the legislation but is expected to sign it.
The first-in-the-nation legislation could be a model for other red states grappling with how to stop their residents from traveling out of state to get abortion pills or ordering them online despite their abortion bans. But people who obtain those pills don’t always have prescriptions for them, particularly if they are mailed from overseas.
Under the Louisiana bill, pregnant women who obtain the medication for their own use would be exempt from criminal liability. But friends or family who help them get the pills and non-pregnant women who obtain them as a precaution could face criminal penalties for possession.
Data from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy group, found that the number of abortions performed annually rose in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. More than 1 million abortions were performed across the U.S. in 2023, the last year for which reliable data is available. That represents an 11 percent increase since 2020, and nearly two-thirds were medication abortions.
Abortion is illegal in Louisiana except to save the life of the mother and in cases of lethal fetal anomaly.
President Joe Biden’s campaign seized on the legislation this week as an example of the “chaos” wrought by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago.
Under the legislation, doctors would need a special license to prescribe the drugs, and prescriptions would be cataloged in a state database, accessible to doctors, pharmacists, Louisiana’s medical board and law enforcement agencies with a warrant. Doctors fear that it could lead to more monitoring and second-guessing of their decisions to prescribe the drugs, especially in emergency situations.
Ellie Schilling, a Louisiana attorney who specializes in reproductive health law, told reporters Wednesday that the state is effectively establishing a database to monitor women’s pregnancies.
“That should be unimaginable in America,” Schilling said.
GOP state Sen. Thomas Pressly introduced the legislation after his sister’s husband tried to end her pregnancy by spiking her drinks with abortion pills. The husband was recently sentenced to six months in jail after pleading guilty to injuring a child and the assault of a pregnant person.
Pressly’s original bill, which had unanimous support, proposed creating a crime of “coerced criminal abortion” for anyone who administers abortion pills to someone to terminate a pregnancy without consent. But his decision to amend the controlled substances provision into the bill late last month to “control the rampant illegal distribution of abortion-inducing drugs” sparked swift backlash from doctors and abortion-rights advocates.
More than 200 doctors in Louisiana, in a letter to Pressly, said the legislation would result in “fear and confusion among patients, doctors, and pharmacists” that would delay care and worsen outcomes.
While mifepristone is used only to terminate pregnancies, misoprostol is also used to treat miscarriages, prepare patients for endometrial biopsy and ease IUD insertion.
“Mischaracterizing misoprostol, a drug routinely and safely used on labor units throughout the state, as a dangerous drug of abuse, creates confusion and misinformation and harms women seeking high quality maternal care,” the letter said. “Setting this precedent is a threat to the safe and autonomous practice of medicine in Louisiana and will have a chilling effect on patients and providers.”
Anti-abortion advocates, including Pressly, have argued that the legislation would still allow doctors to dispense the two medications for lawful reasons.
Sarah Zagorski, spokesperson for Louisiana Right to Life, on Thursday lauded Pressly for spearheading the bill, which she said would “stop the abortion industry from profiting off of abuse and trafficking of vulnerable women through their flagrantly illegal distribution of pills.”
Louisiana Legislature approves bill classifying abortion pills as controlled dangerous substances
Louisiana lawmakers approved a first-of-its-kind bill that would classify two abortion-inducing drugs as a controlled and dangerous substances, despite widespread criticism from doctors. The bill is expected to be signed into law by the governor.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Two abortion-inducing drugs could soon be reclassified as controlled and dangerous substances in Louisiana under a first-of-its-kind bill that received final legislative passage Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by the governor.
Supporters of the reclassification of mifepristone and misoprostol, commonly known as “abortion pills,” say it would protect expectant mothers from coerced abortions, though they cited only one example of that happening, in the state of Texas. Numerous doctors, meanwhile, have said it will make it harder for them to prescribe the medicines, which they also use for other important reproductive health care needs.
Passage of the bill comes as both abortion rights advocates and abortion opponents await a final decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on an effort to restrict access to mifepristone. The justices did not appear ready to limit access to the drug on the day they heard arguments.
The GOP-dominated Legislature’s push to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol could possibly open the door for other Republican states with abortion bans that are seeking tighter restrictions on the drugs. Louisiana currently has a near-total abortion ban in place, applying both to surgical and medical abortions.
Current Louisiana law already requires a prescription for both drugs and makes it a crime to use them to induce an abortion, in most cases. The bill would make it harder to obtain the pills by placing them on the list of Schedule IV drugs under the state’s Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law.
The classification would require doctors to have a specific license to prescribe the drugs, and the drugs would have to be stored in certain facilities that in some cases could end up being located far from rural clinics. Knowingly possessing the drugs without a valid prescription would carry a punishment including hefty fines and jail time. Language in the bill appears to carve out protections for pregnant women who obtain the drug without a prescription for their own consumption.
More than 200 doctors in the state signed a letter to lawmakers warning that the measure could produce a “barrier to physicians’ ease of prescribing appropriate treatment” and cause unnecessary fear and confusion among both patients and doctors. The physicians warn that any delay to obtaining the drugs could lead to worsening outcomes in a state that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.
“This goes too far. We have not properly vetted this with the health care community and I believe it’s going to lead to further harm down the road,” said Democratic Sen. Royce Duplessis, who voted against the measure. “There’s a reason we rank at the bottom in terms of maternal health outcomes, and this is why.”
The reclassification of the two drugs is contained in an amendment to a bill originating in the Senate that would create the crime of “coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud.” Lawmakers in the Senate unanimously supported the original legislation a month ago. Later, bill sponsor Sen. Thomas Pressly pushed for the amendment to reclassify the drugs.
Pressly said both the bill and the amendment were motivated by what happened to his sister Catherine Herring of Texas. In 2022, Herring’s husband slipped her seven misoprostol pills in an effort to induce an abortion without her knowledge or consent.
There have been several cases similar to Herring’s reported by news outlets over the past 15 years, though none of those cited were in Louisiana.
“The purpose of bringing this legislation is certainly not to prevent these drugs from being used for legitimate health care purposes,” Pressly said. “I am simply trying to put safeguards and guardrails in place to keep bad actors from getting these medications.”
The Senate voted 29-7, mainly along party lines, to pass the legislation. In the 39-person Senate there are only five women, all of whom voted in favor of the bill.
In addition to inducing abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol have other common uses, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor and stopping hemorrhaging.
Mifepristone was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000 after federal regulators deemed it safe and effective for ending early pregnancies. It’s used in combination with misoprostol, which the FDA has separately approved to treat stomach ulcers.
The drugs are not classified as controlled substances by the federal government because regulators do not view them as carrying a significant risk of misuse. The federal Controlled Substances Act restricts the use and distribution of prescription medications such as opioids, amphetamines, sleeping aids and other drugs that carry the risk of addiction and overdose.
Abortion opponents and conservative Republicans both inside and outside the state have applauded the Louisiana bill. Conversely, the move has been strongly criticized by Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a social media post described it as “absolutely unconscionable.”
The Louisiana legislation now heads to the desk of conservative Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. The governor, who was backed by former President Donald Trump during last year’s gubernatorial election, has indicated his support for the measure, remarking in a recent post on X, “You know you’re doing something right when @KamalaHarris criticizes you.”
Landry’s office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
A recent survey found that thousands of women in states with abortion bans or restrictions are receiving abortion pills in the mail from states that have laws protecting prescribers. The survey did not specify how many of those cases were in Louisiana.
Louisiana has a near-total abortion ban in place, which applies both to medical and surgical abortions. The only exceptions to the ban are if there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the mother if she continues the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies, when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.
Currently, 14 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions.
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The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case that could determine national access to mifepristone, one of two pills used as part of medication abortion. In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Carrie N. Baker, whose book, History and Politics of Abortion Pills in the United States, is being published by Amherst College Press this year.
Lithwick and Baker discussed the anti-abortion movement’s decadeslong efforts to target the abortion pill, how those efforts hampered FDA approval of the medication in the first place, and how having easier access to reproductive care through a pill that can be sent in the mail and taken at home fundamentally threatens the strategy of those seeking to dismantle abortion rights in this country. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
To listen to the full episode of Amicus, join Slate Plus.
Dahlia Lithwick: This case has been styled, unfortunately, as just a straight-up abortion case; a kind of natural outgrowth of the reversal of Roe in Dobbs from two terms ago. But it’s actually, in very specific ways, an abortion pills case.
I would love for you to just set the table for us by helping me understand how this is different from the kind of surgical abortion fight we were having leading into Dobbs. And how this is kind of a consequence of Dobbs, but also a very different conversation.
Carrie N. Baker: Abortion pills are today 63 percent of the way that people access abortion health care in the country, and it’s probably much higher.
Just a few days ago, the Guttmacher Institute released a study showing that the number of abortions in 2023 topped 1 million, which is more than the last 10 years. The last time it was over a million was 2012, and a major reason why abortion access has increased, despite Dobbs, is because of two things: Abortion pills being more accessible and people being able to access abortion pills through telemedicine.
That happened recently. It happened in 2020 and 2021 as a result of COVID, as everybody began to access health care through telemedicine. Advocates filed a lawsuit to force the FDA to allow people to get abortion pills through telemedicine. Historically, they had not been able to do that, and so people living in rural areas, people even living in states where there are abortion bans, now are able to access abortion pills through telemedicine from doctors in states that still allow abortion health care.
Abortion pills are really the present and the future of abortion, and that’s why they’re being targeted in this case. The anti-abortion movement is very aware that abortion pills are the crux to controlling women’s access to abortion, and so they’re going after it.
The thrust of what you’ve written in your book and in some of your recent pieces in Ms. is that anybody who thinks that the mifepristone case emerges fully formed in the wake of Dobbs actually wasn’t paying attention, because there has been a decadeslong effort by pro-life advocates to churn up doubt and uncertainty about abortion pills, their efficacy, their safety, and that actually this has set the United States way behind the rest of the world, long before Dobbs—all of this “medical uncertainty,” and “the dangers,” and the sort of chumming up of the debate with fake facts and fake claims.
Just for comparison, in France, mifepristone was developed there in the 1980s. It was approved in 1988. This is not the path taken in the United States. And I think your point is, anyone who’s now looking at this debate and saying, “Huh, these are alarming studies, maybe this was an irregular process that the FDA [took],” doesn’t understand that the point was to have an irregular process at the FDA.
Mifepristone was developed in 1980 in France, and the French government approved it in 1988. American anti-abortion activists were over in France trying to interfere with that process and trying to prevent the company, Roussel-Uclaf, from bringing the medication to market. And they used many of the techniques that we’re familiar with today and for the last several decades in the United States, which is terrorizing the executives at the corporation and the medical researchers who were developing the drug. Calling them, standing outside their offices, screaming at them, calling their family members, terrorizing them at their homes—and it didn’t work. The drug was approved.
But then the U.S. anti-abortion movement turned to the U.S. and tried to block it from being approved by the FDA, and they used all these same techniques. And they also targeted the activists who were trying to get it approved and the pharmaceutical companies that might try to get it approved.
Through the anti-abortion work, they prevented Roussel-Uclaf from trying to gain approval for the pill in the United States. They also dissuaded any mainstream pharmaceutical company from taking on mifepristone and trying to get it approved. So eventually what happened is an organization called the Population Council, which was a nonprofit organization that worked on access to contraception around the world, took on the medication and took on the process of doing the clinical trials and applying to the FDA for approval. The Population Council also had to find a distributor for the medication. And so basically a group of private investors created a company called Danco and applied to the FDA to get it approved, got it approved, and then found a manufacturer. All of that process was fraught because of anti-abortion interference. So it took over 12 years after France approved it to get mifepristone approved in the U.S. And the FDA was terrified. The FDA officials were very nervous because they, too, were being targeted.
I’ve interviewed for my book a lot of the activists who were involved in the process, and it was a very irregular process, not because it was done quickly or in any sort of slipshod way. They had belts and suspenders. They were very nervous. They knew they had a target on their back, and they were being not only targeted by anti-abortion activists, but by anti-abortion members of Congress who were threatening their funding. They were under a microscope.
So they were very careful throughout the process of approving the drug. And the lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court case says, Oh, this was done too quickly. It was fast-tracked. They didn’t have adequate evidence. They had voluminous evidence at the time, and in fact, when the FDA approved the drug, they put in place very unusual and medically unnecessary restrictions on medication abortion. For instance, they required that doctors register with a drug manufacturer. They prohibited pharmacies from dispensing the drug. Normally when a drug is approved, the doctor prescribes it, and a pharmacy dispenses it. But what the FDA required in the case of mifepristone is that the doctors themselves order the drug, store the drug, label the drug, and dispense the drug in person to the patients. It’s highly irregular that kind of thing happens. It happens only with really super dangerous drugs. Mifepristone is not a super dangerous drug. It’s actually safer than Tylenol. It actually should be over the counter. We know that now.
They didn’t know that back then, but the people at the FDA wanted it to go smoothly. They didn’t want any complications. So the people at the FDA were not actually hostile to the abortion pill, but they wanted to make sure that there were no problems. And then they were like, “in a few years we’ll remove some of these restrictions.” Well, then Bush got elected in 2000, the same year mifepristone was approved, and of course, once Bush was in power, he was not going to allow the FDA to loosen the restrictions. It wasn’t until 16 years later that eventually the FDA began to loosen some of these restrictions under the Obama administration.
I just think this is such a scales-falling-from-the-eyes moment because if you come into this conversation in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s courtroom, the FDA’s behavior is hard to explain. It looks wildly overregulated, with these mincing steps away from overregulation. It’s still overregulation. And what you’re saying is: You’re the FDA and you are under attack from Day 1 by a concerted—and quite menacing and financially costly—effort to make you practice defensive regulation. This is the necessary result.
This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene said at a pro-life symposium, “We will repeal the FACE Act if we get the opportunity.” And that’s a reference to the 1994 law that was intended to protect abortion providers, health care providers, and patients from the kinds of intimidation and violence they were experiencing just walking into a clinic. And I should note that Rep. Chip Roy of Texas has authored legislation that would repeal the FACE Act. He has 39 co-sponsors. The Senate’s companion bill, which is authored by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, signed on by Josh Hawley, has five co-sponsors.
I just want to be really clear that the Justice Department’s list of pro-life activists who they worry about include people who throw Molotov cocktails and concrete bricks into clinics, who block access to clinics and harass clinics, and commit mass shootings. So this is serious protection. Lets go back to what you said at the very beginning, which is that so much of the playbook in the anti-abortion movement was about surgical abortions and clinics and terrorizing and intimidating people seeking access to a clinic for an abortion. Is the workaround here that you can’t protest someone’s mailbox yet? I think it’s so important because this was your initial point, which is that this movement that is born in terrorizing people, in shouting them down, in flooding them with monetary and physical threats, has no footing in the medication abortion context unless they are able to do the thing they’re trying to do in this case: Stop all abortion pills.
If doctors can prescribe abortion pills by telemedicine and send them by mail, then the central tactic of the anti-abortion movement—which is to basically restrict abortion to an identifiable limited number of clinics, and then terrorize those clinics—that strategy is undermined. They really are very frustrated by the fact that people don’t have to physically go to clinics anymore and cross protest lines, often multiple times, in order to get abortion pills or procedural abortion.
Their strategy all along has been to restrict the number of locations where people can get an abortion and then target those locations by blocking access—and that was what led to the FACE Act—or by terrorizing doctors, following doctors home, protesting in front of doctors’ houses.
If the doctors can’t be identified because they don’t have a brick-and-mortar clinic, if they’re located in a location where they don’t know where they are, well then what? I mean, these telemedicine providers are entirely virtual. They don’t have brick-and-mortar clinics. All they have is a website. And you know, they might go after the website, but they can’t locate the doctors. They can’t locate the patients, they can’t scream to the patients, “You’re murdering your baby.” And that fundamentally undermines their strategy.
Their strategy has been to close down clinics—you bomb a clinic, you bankrupt a clinic. The number of clinics has shrunk significantly. Another major strategy of the anti-abortion movement is to create fake clinics, crisis pregnancy centers that look like clinics. They’re often next door to real clinics and they try to divert patients going to get care by pretending to be the clinic the patient is going to. And then once the patient gets in there, they bombard them with misinformation about abortion—that it causes cancer, that it causes infertility, that it causes depression, none of which is true, all of which has been disproven by leading medical authorities and the vast majority of research.
By having the ability to mail abortion pills to people, their central strategy is undermined. So I think that’s why they’ve invested so much in this lawsuit and in the effort to go after abortion pills—even though it’s a real stretch. What they’re arguing, that the FDA didn’t have enough evidence or that abortion pills are dangerous, it’s completely fictional. But I think really that is their only strategy. And in a way it’s the indignity. It’s all about stigmatizing abortion and making people feel like it’s unsafe.
That’s what the abortion movement has done so well. They’re fighting for the law, yes, but they’re also fighting for our hearts and minds. They want to try to make us feel that abortion is wrong, that it’s dangerous, that it’s immoral. By filing this lawsuit and getting headlines, that “abortion pills are dangerous,” however, I think it’s having an unintended consequence. Before Dobbs, only about 15 percent of the population even knew what abortion pills are. Now many people know what abortion pills are because it’s in the headlines all the time. They’re seeing that, Oh, there’s a medication you can take. And the fact of the matter is all the research shows that people really like them. They don’t want to lay on a table with their feet in stirrups, particularly if they’re survivors of violence. We know that 25 to 30 percent of women are survivors of sexual violence. They don’t want to have to go in, they’d rather be at home, take a pill, do it in the privacy of their home, with their friends nearby.
So, many people prefer abortion pills, but again, people need options. It needs to all be legal and it needs to all be accessible. Once the FDA allowed pharmacies to distribute the medication, it means that your average doctor can now prescribe abortion, like your general practitioner, the person you’ve been going to your whole life, your pediatrician— say you’re 16 and you get pregnant—your pediatrician can prescribe you abortion pills without having to stock them. Then you can get it through the mail or you can get it at a local pharmacy.
It means that more doctors can provide abortion. They don’t have to be abortion doctors and clinics. It can be family care providers. And there’s a whole movement trying to get family care providers to provide abortion—not just pills, but also manual vacuum aspiration—but pills in particular because it’s so easy. Not only doctors, but nurses and physicians’ assistants can also prescribe abortion pills. So it’s creating more access, and that’s what the anti-abortion movement wants to stop.
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Texas doctor who said nine-year-olds can safely give birth appointed to maternal mortality committee
Dr Ingrid Skop called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade ‘a victory’ and has argued in favor of abortion bans
One of the US’s leading anti-abortion activists has been appointed to a Texas health committee tasked with reviewing maternal deaths.
The move worries reproductive justice advocates who say the state’s abortion ban – among the strictest in the US – has placed pregnant women’s lives in jeopardy. The appointment could undermine the committee’s ability to accurately examine the impact of the law on deaths during and in the immediate aftermath of pregnancy, they say.
“This appointment speaks volumes about how seriously certain state leaders are taking the issue of maternal mortality,” said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, an abortion assistance group that advocates for reproductive health equity. “It is another sign that the state is more interested in furthering their anti-abortion agenda than protecting the lives of pregnant Texans.”
Dr Ingrid Skop, a San Antonio-based OB-GYN, has long been vocal about her views on abortion.
Skop serves as vice-president and director of medical affairs for the national anti-abortion research group Charlotte Lozier Institute and is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She is also a plaintiff in a US supreme court lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the key abortion drug mifepristone, which she argues is “dangerous” despite years of evidence showing the drug is safe. She has authored a number of research papers that were ultimately retracted for misleading errors.
Skop – who has called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war” – has argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as nine or 10 to carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Skop told the House oversight committee in 2021. Pregnancy at such a young age is shown to carry significant health risks, including pre-eclampsia and infections.
In Texas, Skop has repeatedly testified at the legislature and in court in support of state abortion bans, most recently in a hearing opposing abortion care for Kate Cox, a Dallas woman who petitioned a judge for emergency access after receiving a lethal fetal diagnosis.
Texas has seen a number of instances of pregnant women being denied emergency abortions, despite, in some cases, life-threatening pregnancy complications. Studies have shown that some patients are being forced to wait at “death’s door” before doctors, who face criminal penalties under the state’s ban, intervene. But Skop has argued that the problem rests with the judgment of individual physicians, not the law itself.
Contrary to the arguments of many experts, Skop believes that abortion bans not only will not lead to an increase in maternal deaths, but may actually help reduce those rates. She calls the link between abortion restrictions and risks to maternal mortality “fallacious”.
Maternal mortality rates in Texas – among the worst in the US – more than doubled between 1999 and 2019. Skop told the Houston Chronicle the state’s high rate of maternal death “deserves rigorous discourse”.
“There are complex reasons for these statistics, including chronic illnesses, poverty and difficulty obtaining prenatal care, and I have long been motivated to identify ways women’s care can be improved,” said Skop. “For over 30 years, I have advocated for both of my patients, a pregnant woman and her unborn child, just like the overwhelming majority of OB-GYNs who don’t perform elective abortions.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists questioned Skop’s appointment, saying it was “crucial” that maternal review committee members be informed by “data, not ideology”. Her bias is relevant because abortion, they note, is inherently tied to maternal health.
“We believe that all members of the MMRC should be unbiased, free of conflicts of interest, and focused on the appropriate standards of care when evaluating maternal mortality and morbidity in Texas, which were already at unacceptably high levels even before Texas passed its abortion bans and restrictions,” said ACOG in a statement.
“Bias against abortion has already led to compromised analysis and, ultimately, dangerously flawed data,” said ACOG, citing three research papers critical of abortion that Skop co-authored. The studies were ultimately retracted by the academic publisher for “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions”, as well as errors and misleading presentations of the data that showed a “lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part”.
Skop did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
The 23-member Texas maternal mortality and review committee, created in 2013 amid a maternal healthcare crisis, gathers data on pregnancy-related deaths.
The committee’s latest report showed that 90% of maternal deaths in the state were probably preventable. It is now reviewing pregnancy-related deaths from 2020 and plans to examine the impact of state abortion laws on maternal health in the coming years.
Nakeenya Wilson, who nearly lost her life giving birth in Texas, sat on the committee as an outspoken community advocate, pushing for the release of data when the state health commissioner delayed publication of the report in 2022. As a voice for people of color, Wilson championed the stories of black women, who are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality rates both nationally and in Texas.
After legislation in 2023 eliminated her “community advocate” role, Wilson applied to a different role on the committee, but did not get the job.
While Skop’s role is meant for a rural community member, she has spent her career working in San Antonio, a major Texas city. Skop, who is one of seven new appointees, will begin her six-year term on 1 June.
“As a black mother who went through a traumatic pregnancy first-hand, I think I provided that necessary lived experience and could represent my community well,” Wilson said. “We need to ask, what community is [Skop] representing?”
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