(LifeSiteNews) — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law on Tuesday making it a crime to secretly give a woman abortion drugs or force her to take them.
H.B. 1551, introduced by Rep. Jimmy Gazaway, makes it a felony to try to kill an unborn child by giving a pregnant woman abortion drugs without her knowledge or consent.
Abortion has already been almost completely banned in the state, with an exception only to save the life of the mother. While this means facilitating an abortion by distributing or ingesting abortion pills has been illegal, no laws have specifically addressed coercing a woman into taking abortion pills until now.
The ban on coerced chemical abortion passed unanimously in both the Arkansas House and Senate, according to the president of the Arkansas Family Council, and will take effect later this summer.
The Heritage Foundation has documented over a dozen cases of coerced chemical abortions in the U.S. over the past decade, including cases in which the pills were crushed into a pregnant woman’s food or drink, and cases where other pills were swapped with abortifacients.
A 2022 case in which an attorney slipped abortifacients into his wife’s drinks, causing serious cramping and bleeding and forcing her to go to the hospital, has helped spark proposals like H.B. 1551 across the country.
In a recent case in 2024, a mother told her pregnant daughter she had to abort her child “or else,” after the daughter had planned a gender reveal party for her baby.
