The Mississippi Legislature gave final approval to legislation to criminalise the mailing of abortion pills as a felony drug trafficking offense.
House Bill 1613, originally intended to penalize individuals possessing 200 or more grams of illegal drugs, was amended to also criminalize those who “create, sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute, dispense, prescribe or possess with intent to create, sell, barter, transfer, manufacture, distribute, dispense or prescribe” any “medicine, drug or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman to cause the death of the unborn child” without an in-person doctor visit.
The final version passed the state House 76-38 and the Senate 37-15 on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported, and now awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves to become law. Reeves is pro-life and expected to sign. Abortions are illegal in Mississippi except for cases of rape or medical threats to a mother’s life (in which abortion is not medically necessary anyway).
“The intent is to keep doctors from out of state from circumventing our current law,” said Republican state Rep. Celeste Hurst, who introduced the amendment to cover abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol.
“The state of Mississippi has been pretty clear of where they are about their pro-life position,” Republican state Sen. Daniel Sparks added. “If people are circumventing that through the mail or through other mechanisms, then I think we’re trying to be consistent with what the law is.”
Mailing abortion-inducing drugs across state lines has become the abortion lobby’s most important tool for perpetuating abortion-on-demand and undermining pro-life laws, thanks to the difficulty of tracking pills shipped in nondescript packaging and pills usually taken in complete privacy.
The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, that Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills.