Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized a rule that expands the availability of abortion pills.
Alabama’s Attorney General believes the move is an attempt by the Biden administration to get around the law banning most abortions in the state.
In a statement earlier this week, Attorney General Steve Marshall made it clear that it’s still illegal to provide those pills and for women to take them.
“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law,” he said in the statement. “It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law—which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”
Marshall expanded on the issue Friday during an appearance on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
The attorney general explained how the current abortion statutes don’t negate other laws that still make it illegal for women to take drugs that cause abortions.
“[W]e do have a chemical endangerment law in our state,” Marshall said, “and the question was asked of us: ‘Did the provisions in that Human Life Protection Act that would exempt a women from being prosecuted on the abortion being performed, would that same prohibition apply so that women could not be charged, for example ingesting a significant amount of meth and causing the baby being born addicted, would somehow or another the history of case law that allowed those charges to take place, would that be removed?’ And our answer to that was no.”
“We obviously want the child to be protected in utero,” Marshall said. “We want to make sure what women’s health is protected, and we’re going to continue to be very aggressive on that front.”
Marshall thinks the new FDA policy is “a gross overreach by the Biden administration.”
“[L]et’s also kind of recognize what’s going on here,” he continued. “This is again one of those coordinated attacks on red states when they exercise their true sovereign powers over issues. Alabama’s been very clear here that we are not going to allow abortions except for limited circumstances.”
He also said this is not the first time the Biden administration has tried to go around a law passed by Alabama and other Republicans states.
“And for the Biden administration, just as they have attempted to make us have a genderless society, when Alabama says ‘hey boys have to play with boys in sports and girls have to play with girls’ they then enact these new regulations that would somehow try to supersede that, this is another effort by the Biden administration to attack another conservative policy that Alabama holds pretty strong to,” he said. “And so we’ve been very aggressive on pushing back on that, and we continue to be able to do it.”
Marshall said he believes the abortion ban in Alabama has been very effective in protecting unborn children.
“I’ve been very pleased that Alabama, following Dobbs, was the first state to be able to protect the child for the entire first 9 months of its life in utero,” he said, “and we’re going to continue to validate that moving forward.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
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