Three Republican attorneys general filed a complaint in federal court on October 11 arguing that their states have a right to pregnant teenagers, and that right is being violated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The case is one of many ongoing lawsuits targeting mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the most common abortion medication regime in the United States. (When folks say “abortion pills,” they’re usually talking about mifepristone and misoprostol.) The FDA approved mifepristone for abortion and miscarriage management decades ago, and last year, allowed mifepristone to be sent by mail, dispensed online, or at pharmacies.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador—all Republicans—take issue with this. Abortion access decreases teen pregnancy, and they seem to think that is a bad thing.
“Remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States,” the attorneys general allege in the complaint, which was filed before forced birth enthusiast Judge Matt Kacsmaryk in the Northern District of Texas’s Amarillo Division. They claim that decreased births constitute “a sovereign injury to the state in itself,” and causes downstream injuries like “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are reduced.” In other words, uteri are state slush funds, and girls owe the state reproduction once they are capable of it.
States exist to serve people, not the other way around. But in order for courts to hear a case, would-be plaintiffs need to show that they experienced an actual injury that the party they’re suing caused, and that a court can fix. A personal dislike of somebody else taking medicine is not a legitimate grievance. So the states are trying to show that they are entitled to the population growth and accompanying funds that pregnant minors would produce, and the FDA is getting in the way of that. In my expert legal opinion, this is deeply gross and weird.
The ick factor only intensifies in some of the other arguments the attorneys general make. The complaint also says that each of the states is “the legal parent or guardian of many minor girls of reproductive age”—a reference to girls in state custody, like foster care or juvenile detention. For those girls, they argue, the state is a stand-in for parents. And as parents, they claim, they have a right to consent to their children’s medical care, which is apparently nullified if teen girls in foster care can “obtain abortion drugs online by mail all on their own.” Under the state’s theory, it can separate children from their actual parents, declare itself their father now, and deem a daughter’s pregnancy her daddy’s prerogative.
Bailey, Kobach, and Labrador’s argument treats teenagers as breeding stock. The complaint is shocking in its brazenness. But it is a natural outgrowth of the conservative legal movement’s efforts to subordinate women: Girls choosing not to give birth is wrong, and men can go to court to set it right.
