In South Carolina on Wednesday, House lawmakers spent more than five harrowing hours debating House Bill H4760—legislation designed to make the state’s existing ban on mail-order abortion pills even more extreme, and effectively make medication abortion nearly impossible to access.

H4760, titled “abortion-inducing drugs,” passed in an 81-31 vote with one Republican voting against it; one Democrat voting for it; and seven lawmakers from both aisles not voting at all. Two amendments were ultimately added to the bill following the debate on the House floor: One would threaten up to life in prison for giving abortion pills to a pregnant person without their knowledge. (Administering drugs without consent is already a crime, but this amendment dramatically escalates the penalty.) The other makes it illegal to raise funds or distribute money to buy abortion pills, potentially destroying the crucial and life-saving work of abortion funds.

The core of the bill would reclassify both mifepristone and misoprostol as Schedule IV controlled substances—a category typically reserved for addictive drugs like Valium or Xanax. (The reality is that both abortion pills are safer than Tylenol and Viagra.) If it becomes law, a person could face up to five years in prison if they have abortion pills without a prescription from a doctor in the state.

It also threatens providers and doctors outside the state with prison time and fines if they send abortion pills to a South Carolinian to terminate their pregnancy, directly targeting shield laws, which protect doctors and health care providers in blue states from being prosecuted for providing abortion care in abortion-banned states. It’s already illegal for a doctor in South Carolina to mail a patient abortion pills (the pills must be dispensed in person), with Rep. Jay Jordan (R) making clear that the bill is a “closing of a loophole that further demonstrates what has been the policy in South Carolina, which is anti-abortion.” Currently, only 22 states and Washington, DC have a shield law in place.

Democrats argued that classifying abortion pills as Schedule IV drugs would make it harder to access the medicine for other reasons, like inducing labor, treating miscarriages, aiding IUD insertion, or controlling bleeding after birth. The re-classification would require the drugs to be locked up at hospitals or doctors’ offices, making them significantly more difficult to access, especially in the case of an emergency.

“There is absolutely no documented history of these drugs being abused,”  Rep. Spencer Wetmore (D) said of the bill. “They’re not addictive.” Rep. Justin Bamberg (D) added: “Why do we keep passing bills and amendments and laws that continue to turn us into a surveillance state?”

In October 2024, Louisiana became the first state in the nation to criminalize abortion pills and classify them as a Schedule IV drug. “It adds several minutes to that process,” one Louisiana doctor told CNN at the time of accessing a Schedule IV drug versus just being able to have Mifepristone on hand. “If you’ve ever watched someone bleed out after childbirth, as I have, you know that minutes can make a difference.”

Still, some anti-abortion legislators complained this bill didn’t go far enough. Twenty GOP legislators wanted to turn it into a total abortion ban (abortion is currently banned at six weeks) in which life is defined as beginning at conception; some GOP lawmakers also tried to add amendments that would have completely banned the drugs for abortions, or would have criminalized women who were caught getting abortion pills.

“In a state already grappling with one of the nation’s worst and most complex reproductive health crises, advancing this bill is reckless and cruel,” Katherine Farris, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s chief medical officer, said in a statement. The one Republican who voted against the bill did so because it wasn’t extreme enough.

All around, it sounds like a loss for Democrats, a loss for those 20 Republicans who wanted an even more dangerous bill, and about another 74 losses for women’s bodily autonomy.