Louisiana is not a great place to get pregnant. If you need an abortion, a near-total ban means it’s almost impossible to get one, even in cases of rape or incest – anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal can go to jail for 15 years. And if you plan on having the baby, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Although, as Senator Bill Cassidy has helpfully noted, “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”. In other words, if you ignore Black people (a third of his constituents), things look a little better. So that’s OK then!

This week, Louisiana decided to descend further into dystopia and passed a first-of-its-kind law making abortion pills a controlled substance. Senate Bill 276 makes possession of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Republicans excel at using sneaky tactics to undermine our rights, and this bill is no exception. When it was originally put forward, you see, the bill didn’t include the amendment that turns abortion pills into Schedule IV drugs – a classification normally given to dangerous or addictive substances. Rather, the bill was positioned as a way to protect pregnant people by making it a crime to intentionally give an abortion-inducing drug to a pregnant woman without her consent. Everyone can get behind that idea, right?

There was also an emotional story behind the legislation that made it easy to sell. Senator Thomas Pressly, the author of the bill, explained that his sister, Catherine Herring, had been slipped the abortion pill by her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Various outlets have said that Herring then managed to save the baby through a “medical abortion reversal process”. KTBS, for example, a Louisiana media outlet, reported that Herring “used a........

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