CHARLESTON (LifeSiteNews) — The West Virginia Senate voted 28-5 on Tuesday to ban the sale or distribution of abortifacients without a prescription, in an attempt to crack down on out-of-state abortionists mailing pills to circumvent the state’s pro-life laws.

SB 85 states that any attempt at “placing abortifacients in the stream of commerce” without a “lawfully valid prescription” is a felony punishable by 3-10 years in jail for non-physicians and punishable by loss of medical license for violating physicians. Women cannot be prosecuted for taking abortion pills under the bill, which is now pending before the state House.

“This important legislation is designed to protect life in West Virginians and stop the practice of abortifacients being sent and delivered to West Virginia residents without a lawful prescription,” Republican state Senate Government Organization Committee Chairwoman Patricia Rucker said.

Current West Virginia law prohibits abortion at implantation with exceptions for rape, incest, when an unborn baby has a “lethal anomaly which renders it incompatible with life outside of the uterus,” and for “medical emergencies,” defined as when a medical condition would “necessitate an abortion to avert serious risk of the patient’s death or serious risk of substantial life-threatening physical impairment of a major bodily function, not including psychological or emotional conditions.” 

Passage of the law in 2022 led to the end of abortions at West Virginia’s only abortion facility, leaving out-of-state travel or importation of pills the only ways residents can abort their children, with the latter key to the cause of perpetuating abortion-on-demand regardless of the risks to the women they are purportedly serving.

In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged,” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says that mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.” 

This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”

“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”

Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Pro-lifers hope statements by his Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about reviewing the dangers of abortion pills may mark the beginning of a reversal.