Abortion Pill Prescriptions Are Now Being Tracked in Parts of the US – With Help From a Little-Known Tech Company
Business Insider, March 10, 2025
Last May, Louisiana passed a law to monitor misoprostol and mifepristone, the two pills commonly used to induce abortions. The law reclassified the drugs as “controlled substances,” a designation typically given to medications that carry the risk of abuse. Bamboo Health, the company running Louisiana’s prescription monitoring database, is ready to track the drugs. As of March, Louisiana clinicians are required to log every mifepristone and misoprostol prescription they write in Bamboo’s database, according to the New Orleans Health Department. Texas, Indiana, and Idaho are considering similar measures for tracking these drugs. All three states work with Bamboo.
Louisiana Woman Pleads Not Guilty to Felony After Allegedly Giving Abortion Pills from N.Y. Doctor to Her Teen
CBS News, March 12, 2025
A Louisiana woman pleaded not guilty Tuesday after allegedly getting abortion pills from a New York doctor and giving them to her teenage daughter to terminate a pregnancy, a felony in the southern state that has one of the strictest near-total abortion bans in the U.S. The woman’s arraignment is part of a cross-state legal battle that involves what may be the first instance of criminal charges against a doctor accused of sending abortion pills to another state, putting Louisiana’s abortion ban in tension with New York’s shield laws. In January, a West Baton Rouge grand jury unanimously issued an indictment against the 39-year-old Louisiana woman for criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs, which is a felony. The woman has not been publicly identified by The Associated Press to protect the identity of the minor. The indictment in Louisiana came months after the state became the first to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol – a two-drug regimen that can be used to end pregnancies through the 10th week – as “controlled dangerous substances.”
Risks of State Abortion Reporting Mandates Outweigh the Benefits, an Advocacy Groups Says
Associated Press, March 12, 2025
States should stop requiring health providers to file reports on every abortion because the information poses a risk to both them and their patients in the current political environment, a research group that advocates for abortion access says. The Guttmacher Institute says in a new recommendation that the benefit of mandated and detailed data collection is no longer worth the downsides: It could reveal personal information, be stigmatizing for patients and cumbersome for providers – or could be used in investigations. “It would be a mistake for anyone to assume now that the information a state could collect about abortion would not be used to harm people,” said Kelly Baden, Guttmacher’s vice president for public policy. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly three years ago, it opened the door for states to ban most abortions. It also ignited policy battles over information collected about ending pregnancies. The possibility of reports being used in investigations has increased with the return of President Donald Trump and anti-abortion officials in key federal government jobs, Baden said.
Trump DOJ’s Limits on FACE Act Enforcement Fuel Concern From Abortion Providers
NPR, March 9, 2025
One morning in late August 2021, Phebe Brandt was attending to patients at a Planned Parenthood facility in Philadelphia, where she works as a nurse practitioner, when someone at the front desk told her a man had barricaded himself in one of the bathrooms. The man holed up in the bathroom was Matthew Connolly, an anti-abortion rights activist from Minnesota. Federal prosecutors filed a lawsuit against Connolly under the FACE Act, or the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The law prohibits threat of force, obstruction and property damage meant to interfere with reproductive health care services, including abortion. The federal government’s civil case sought to impose financial penalties on Connolly and deter future disruptive actions by him at abortion clinics. The lawsuit was one of several the Justice Department brought during the Biden administration as it sought to protect access to reproductive health care. In the past six weeks, the Trump administration has moved to undo all of that. The Justice Department’s new leaders say past enforcement of the FACE Act is “the prototypical example” of what they say is the weaponization of law enforcement against conservatives. Instead, the Justice Department now says it will no longer enforce violations of the statute, except in extraordinary circumstances – such as cases involving death or serious property damage.
A Health System Is Fighting Idaho’s Abortion Ban. It’s Not Its First Controversial Stance.
ProPublica, March 12, 2025
It was April 2024. Souza said Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System had airlifted six pregnant patients in a span of four months to states where abortion was a legal treatment option in health emergencies. That happened once in all of 2023, a time when a court order kept Idaho from enforcing the ban in those cases. Less than a year later, St. Luke’s is the one major institution – other than advocacy groups – standing in the way of restrictions on emergency abortion care in Idaho, a state with one of the most absolute abortion bans in the country. The Justice Department on March 5 dropped a lawsuit brought under President Joe Biden that claimed Idaho’s ban, which does not allow abortions to protect a patient’s health, violated a federal law mandating access to emergency medical care. St. Luke’s administrators, who made the same claim in their own lawsuit in January, vowed to press on. A temporary court order in the St. Luke’s case will allow emergency abortions to take place for now. The abortion lawsuit is the latest controversial stance for a hospital system operating in a state whose political climate treats public institutions – hospitals, libraries, schools, health departments – not as the basic infrastructure of society but as ideological battlegrounds.
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Note: The information contained in this publication reflects media coverage of women’s health issues and does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
