Senate Democrats are urging Danco Laboratories, a manufacturer of the abortion pill mifepristone, to add “miscarriage management” to the drug’s label.
Senators Mazie Hirono, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Jeanne Shaheen, Ron Wyden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Alex Padilla, and Maggie Hassan are urging the company to submit an application with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add the additional wording to the packaging.
Currently, the drug’s packaging only lists it as approved for medication abortion.
According to a report from 19th News, an independent website co-founded by the former editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, “the senators said an update to the label would allow health care providers to prescribe and patients to use mifepristone for miscarriage management without fear of criminal repercussions, which may have felt since the overturn of Roe v. Wade this past summer.”
“We know that even when abortion was available everywhere, poor people and minority women did not have access to this kind of care,” Sen. Hirono told 19th News. “Medicare and Medicaid did not fund abortions. This whole situation has been exacerbated with this wholesale attack on a person’s reproductive decisions — anti-abortion people are doing everything they can right now, in every way, including trying to stop the use of certain drugs and contraception. It’s an all-out assault on bodily autonomy.”
Hirono also made it a race issue, saying that miscarriage “hits black and minority women disproportionately.”
“Some of us are doing everything we can to make available the kinds of treatments that women should have available to them, including this particular drug for early miscarriage management — especially because miscarriage hits Black women and minority women disproportionately,” Hirono said.
“The chaos that was created by the Dobbs decision impacts everybody,” Hirono continued. “There is no state that is safe from efforts to try to stop people from controlling their own bodies.”
This week, Republican lawmakers in Iowa introduced a bill to make manufacturing or prescribing mifepristone, a main ingredient in abortion drugs, a felony.
Iowa Republicans Introducing Bill to Make Manufacturing or Prescribing Abortion Drugs a Felony
Texas and Indiana are currently the only states with full or partial bans on medication abortions that the courts have not blocked.
The use of abortion drugs is banned after seven weeks of pregnancy in the Lone Star State and after ten weeks in Indiana.
The FDA approves medication abortions up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.
