If in the near future the U.S. Supreme Court decides to ban the abortion pill, you’ll have Andrew Bailey and Kris Kobach to blame.
The two men — the attorneys general of Missouri and Kansas, respectively — both signed friend of the court briefs backing the Texas case that suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the drug, named mifepristone. And in Kobach’s case, the brief made a rather startling argument: The pill should be banned in defense of the democratic process.
Why? Because the FDA’s decision allowing mifepristone to be sent and received through the mail permits women to circumvent the law in states that have prohibited abortion. The brief signed by Kobach and 20 other Republican attorneys general — 18 of them men — said the Biden administration should never have allowed such a violation.
“The FDA and the administration as a whole have no intention to respect the Constitution, the Supreme Court, or the democratic process when it comes to abortion,” the group asserted.
That argument takes a fair amount of chutzpah. Kobach, after all, represents a state where less than a year ago voters made overwhelmingly clear their desire to preserve abortion access. Kobach is doing his level best to contravene their wishes.
So much for the “democratic process” in Kansas.
A second brief, signed by Bailey and Missouri Solicitor General Joshua M. Divine, offered another brazen argument for banning the pill: to preserve the right of women to choose not to get an abortion.
“The ready availability of abortions by mail means that abusive boyfriends or others will more easily be able to coerce women (by force, pressure, or deception) to obtain abortions,” they wrote.
And in what can only be interpreted as a bit of high-profile legal trolling, Bailey’s office cited a PBS interview in which U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, said she had received a surgical abortion in which the providers continued with the procedure after she tried to halt it. That is disturbing — but it is also notable that Bush, a pro-choice firebrand, in February co-sponsored federal legislation to preserve access to abortion medication in states where abortion remains legal. Her horrible experience is an argument for more access to safe, professional, legal abortion — not against it.
We don’t discount the possibility that women can sometimes be coerced into making unwanted life-altering decisions. But it is disingenuous at best — and outright misleading at worst — to suggest that the act of denying a choice to women is actually a means of preserving their choices.
And there is reason to believe that Missourians favor restoring access to abortion. (A 2019 “trigger law” banning abortion went into effect last year after the 6-3 conservative supermajority Supreme Court broke precedent and overturned Roe v. Wade.) A poll last August found that 58% of respondents want to allow abortions during the first eight weeks of pregnancy. That presumably includes medication abortions, which are responsible for more than half of all abortions today. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of Americans say banning medication abortions would hurt their families.
It is fairly clear, however, that Republican leaders in Missouri and Kansas don’t much care what the majority of residents in their states might think about the topic. Kobach, remember, has already claimed one victory, warning big pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS against selling mifepristone in Kansas even before last week’s ruling.
But Bailey and Kobach aren’t the only offenders. The Kansas Legislature, after all, just passed a nonsense bill requiring doctors to “inform” patients about the false assertion that medication abortions can be reversed — one of several bills pushed by antiabortion groups despite last year’s vote. Missouri officials, meanwhile, have done their utmost to avoid a Kansas-style vote on the matter.
For now, at least, abortion pills remain available in Kansas. Soon, it’s likely that the Supreme Court will decide the matter once for all. But we know where Kansas and Missouri Republicans stand: They want to deprive voters of their voice on abortion. And if voters have their say anyway, those leaders will ignore them.
