Regarding Students for Life’s “Abortion Pill Trafficking Ban”
HB1168, an “abortion pill trafficking ban” written by Students for Life, is the latest pro-life bill in Oklahoma to gain momentum. The bill passed the House floor and then the Senate committee, and appears to have died for the year on the Senate Floor as it did not receive a hearing before the deadline.
Students for Life is hosting a rally at the capitol today at 1 PM, and it appears that the language of the dead bill will be amended into another bill in conference committee, giving it a chance to still pass this year.
The main problem with the bill, as usual, is that the language does not meaningfully ban abortion pill trafficking.
But, like most bills written by the pro-life lobby, it is worse than simply doing nothing because, as a secondary effect, it provides political cover to politicians who want to make meaningless campaign promises about being pro-life while doing nothing to actually abolish abortion.
First, practically, it does nothing to stop abortion pills. The process of getting abortion pills to the women who order them involves two parties: (1) the out-of-state activist organizations who fill the orders and (2) the mail carrier. The out-of-state activists are not subject to Oklahoma law. Under some legal theories, Oklahoma could attempt to prosecute people from other states for acts committed in other states, but, even if the theory is legitimate, it requires collaboration from other states, and, in most cases, blue states. Louisiana recently attempted to prosecute a New York abortionist for tele-health abortion services provided by the doctor, but New York simply refused to comply. There is nothing to stop abortion pill distribution organizations from camping out in New Mexico or Illinois and there is nothing Oklahoma could do to prosecute them.
The other party involved is the mail carrier. They can’t be prosecuted under the Students for Life language either because they have no way of knowing that what they are transporting is abortion pills. The bill’s language makes clear that only “A person who knows or has reason to know that another person intends to use an abortion-inducing drug to cause an unlawful abortion” can be prosecuted, which makes sense. The pills are shipped in nondescript packages. It would not be appropriate to prosecute the mail-carrier unless they had reason to know that the package contained abortion pills.
So if the mail carrier and pill distribution activists can’t be prosecuted, then what’s the purpose of the bill?
The second problem is that, politically, this language undercuts efforts to abolish abortion. As Bradley Pierce has said, politics 101 is the art of looking like you’re doing something without doing anything. Pro-life organizations have to look like they are accomplishing something so they can continue to justify their own existence to donors and supporters, even if the bills don’t actually do anything.
Even worse, pretend bills like this provide cover to the very politicians who oppose bills that would *actually* establish justice and rescue preborn children. For example, recently, the Oklahoma GOP issued a formal censure of four Republican Senators who opposed the Abolition of Abortion Act. But now, if this fake bill comes to floor, those Senators will be able to support a do-nothing bill and attempt to trick voters into thinking they are pro-life heroes. (“Attempt” being an important word.)
Further, this bill could allow weak Republicans who don’t want to abolish abortion to pretend that the abortion pill trafficking has been dealt with because they passed the “abortion pill trafficking bill,” even though it is not going to actually stop anything. If it passes, when we come to legislators in the future and tell them they need to abolish abortion to stop the 3,000+ self-managed abortions annually in Oklahoma, they might cite this bill and say that they’ve already done all they can do.
In summary, while this bill is not iniquitous in the sense that it approves of some abortions like a 20-week ban or heartbeat bill, it’s the quintessential pro-life bill in that it:
Christians, and particularly Christian legislators, must cease participating with groups like Students for Life who write bills like this. Until we understand and act upon the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, the only responsible party to the murder of preborn children in Oklahoma is the mother, we are spinning our wheels and accomplishing nothing.
