Three Republican state attorneys general have renewed a push to restrict access to medication abortion, and their latest legal move includes an exceptionally absurd justification for their campaign against abortion pills.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador filed an amended complaint earlier this month that seeks to compel the Federal Drug Administration to restore restrictions on mifepristone, one of two pills required to induce an abortion. The revised filing comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the original plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors and groups, had no legal standing to sue, in part because they did not show how they have been harmed or are likely to be harmed by the FDA’s expansion of medication abortion access.
In the complaint, the attorneys general argue that expanding access to abortion pills poses a potential injury to their states because it leads to lower birth rates, including among teenagers.
“This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself,” the complaint says.
A decrease in birth rates, it adds, also leads to “further injuries” such as “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds” due to lower population numbers.
“Defendants’ actions are causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” the plaintiffs say. “Each abortion represents at least one lost potential or actual birth.”
As a whole, the complaint paints mifepristone as a highly dangerous drug, contradicting decades of research showing that abortion pills are safe and effective. According to the FDA, out of approximately 5.9 million women who took mifepristone to terminate their pregnancy between September 2000 and December 2022, there were 32 deaths, though the agency noted that those deaths “cannot with certainty be causally attributed to mifepristone” due to other health conditions they may have had.
But the argument that abortion pills result in “loss in potential population” is particularly egregious. By asserting that restricting access to abortion is a valid means to increase a state’s population — and arguing that that interest takes precedence over a pregnant person’s individual liberty — the attorneys general are reducing pregnant people to nothing more than a vehicle by which a state increases its political representation and federal funding.
Conservatives have fought for decades to establish as a matter of law that their belief in life at conception outweighs the right to make decisions about one’s own body. This argument, however, blows away any pretense that a pregnant person’s individual liberty matters at all.