Mississippi governor: Doctors who prescribe abortion pills will lose medical license

AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

Republican Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced on Sunday that Mississippi doctors stand to lose their medical license for prescribing abortion pills. 

Mississippi is the first state to fully outlaw elective abortions following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade. 

Reeves made his remarks in an interview with Fox News Sunday, where he explained that licensed physicians who practice medicine in the state of Mississippi will be stripped of their license to practice if they perform an elective abortion.

“If a physician is practicing medicine in the state of Mississippi, they have to have a license to do so and if abortion is illegal in our state, which it is, then those medicines will not be allowed and they will not have a license to practice in our state,” Reeves said.

“Any physician that is practicing, whether it’s through telemedicine or otherwise… that practices in our state is practicing not only based upon the standards of care that we require in our state, but also based upon state law,” he continued, stating that doctors who violate the law stand to lose their license through the state board of medical licensure.

The ban on abortions in Mississippi includes a ban on abortion pills, which are sometimes prescribed to women seeking elective abortions in the first trimester.

When asked if the state legislature intended to create an amendment for the anti-abortion law to allow for an exception for pregnancies caused by rape, the governor responded that he did not believe any such amendment would make it through the legislature.

Mississippi is not alone in passing new laws regarding abortion pills. In June, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed a bill to make mailing abortion pills a crime in the state.

According to the Louisiana law, SB 388 prohibits “criminal abortion by means of the use of an abortion inducing drug without the prescribing physician being physically present during the administration of the drug,” punishable by a $1,000 fine and a maximum of six months in prison.

The bill, which goes into effect on August 1, will not however punish any pregnant women. It also allows for other contraceptive methods, such as the emergency contraception Plan B, to continue being sold.

In March, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed into legislation a ban on telemedicine abortion, which effectively prohibits abortion pills from being mailed out.

“With this bill, we will protect both unborn babies and their mothers from this dangerous procedure,” Noem wrote.