An Ohio court endangered women’s health in siding with the abortion lobby in a case about abortion pills, Ohio Right to Life warned Wednesday.
The Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday, preventing the state from applying a law allowing only doctors to provide chemical abortion pills. The court blocked Ohio from penalizing physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives for dispensing abortion pills, finding that they would likely have the right to do so under Ohio’s 2023 state ballot initiative on abortion.
The pro-life group, which referred to the state law as “Ohio’s common-sense health and safety requirement,” strongly condemned the ruling.
“The practice of medicine should be done by doctors, not lawyers who are diluting the practice of medicine and placing women’s lives at risk,” the group said in a press release. “The abortion industry will always choose profit over the health of women and this decision reveals their willingness to do that yet again.”
“Ohio Right to Life cannot emphasize enough that transfer of care is extremely high-risk for women due to the chance of errors, omissions, and adverse events,” it later noted.
Physician assistants, nurses, and other non-doctors can dispense abortion pills “while a broader legal challenge continues through the courts,” Cleveland.com reported.
“The injunction specifically blocks enforcement of state laws that could be interpreted to allow punishment of advanced practice clinicians—including physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives—for providing medication abortions,” the report added.
The court had issued previous preliminary injunctions against other state laws, ruling that enforcing them would violate the ballot initiative, known as Ohio’s Reproductive Freedom Amendment.
The ACLU of Ohio represents abortion facilities and other health care providers in the case, Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio v. Attorney General Dave Yost.
“We are relieved by the court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction that will allow advanced practice clinicians to provide medication abortions to Ohio patients in need,” the state ACLU chapter said in a press release.
As Ohio Right to Life mentioned, the chemical abortion pill method poses the risk of significant side effects. According to AbortionProcedures.com, a project from LiveAction, the abortion pill procedure involves “usually limited medical supervision for the woman,” and almost all women experience abdominal pain. They may also experience nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, and a headache.
Women may need surgery to repeat the procedure if the baby’s remains are not fully removed. The chemical abortion pill has been approved for up to 10 weeks’ gestation. The later in pregnancy women use the pills, the more dangerous they become.
More women use the chemical abortion pill, making it the most popular method of killing an unborn baby, despite the dangers involved. As the Centers for Disease Control reported last November, in 2022, “53.3% of all abortions were early medication abortions. Use of early medication abortion increased 4% from 2021 to 2022 and 129% from 2013 to 2022.”
Abortion pills have become easier to acquire. Pro-lifers have attempted to restrict or regulate abortion pills at the state and federal levels.
Ohio Right to Life urged Yost, a Republican, to appeal the case, even all the way to the Supreme Court.
“The only way to avoid this life-threatening situation is for a doctor to be the one who prescribes these abortion-inducing medications so that he or she is also the one who deals with these frequent complications,” the pro-life group added. “Given these facts, we are confident that pro-life Attorney General Dave Yost will have ample ground to appeal this decision all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s tragic that women’s lives will hang in the balance while lawyers instead of doctors make these decisions.”
