CHARLESTON (LifeSiteNews) — Legislation that would specifically criminalize actions to import or distribute abortion pills in West Virginia is currently making its way through the state legislature, in order to stop the abortion lobby’s mail-order business from undermining the state’s preborn protections.

Senate Bill 173 would forbid abortifacient drugs or chemicals from being “sen[t] by by courier, delivery, or mail service … to a person in the state of West Virginia”; placed “into the stream of commerce”; prescribed “regardless of whether the prescriber was in the state of West Virginia”; or otherwise disseminated “without a lawfully valid prescription.” 

Physicians who break the law would lose their medical licenses, while non-physicians would face anywhere from three months to ten years in prison. Pregnant women themselves could not be prosecuted, but those fed abortion drugs against their will would also be able to bring civil actions against those responsible, as could her family members.

Most abortions are illegal in West Virginia under the Unborn Child Protection Act, which a federal court ruled last year includes abortion pills. But as long as abortion pills can be ordered over the internet from out-of-state suppliers and taken in complete privacy, abortions will remain possible for any West Virginia resident who wants one.

“A lot of these websites, we don’t know where they’re operating from,” explained Republican state Sen. Laura Wakim-Chapman. “Some of them are operating outside of the United States. We don’t know what kind of pills are coming into our state. They say they’re abortion pills, but we really don’t know what they are.”

“It was very shocking to me during testimony on two of the committees that there was a young man who used his actual name and was able to order these pills, underage, no parental consent and no medical exam, no indication that he was even pregnant,” Chapman added. “It’s very, kind of scary, to think that children are able to get these pills that could harm them.”

SB 173 cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, and now awaits a vote by the full state Senate. Republicans overwhelmingly control both chambers of West Virginia’s legislature, and Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey is pro-life, so the bill should have little trouble becoming law.

However, enforcement is another matter. Pro-abortion states like California and New York are refusing to cooperate with pro-life states like Louisiana in their efforts to extradite abortionists over mailed abortion pills. Those disputes are currently working their way through the courts, and, in the meantime, the federal government shows little interest in establishing a national standard.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to soften the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that he would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.

Pro-lifers were given hope in May that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who “moderated” during his own presidential bid) promised last May a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills, though no timetable have since been announced. But no conclusions have yet emerged, and some pro-life leaders have called for the firing of U.S. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over reports he is intentionally “slow walking” the review, which Makary denies.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”