Today’s MAGA Hot Mic moment features Arizona, where women and children are being denied basic life-saving medication as a result of the state’s draconian abortion ban. 

It hasn’t even been a full month since Arizona’s extreme law has gone into place, and women have already lost the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies. 

Washington Post: “For years, Deborah Power, a rheumatologist in Tucson, had prescribed methotrexate to manage her 14-year-old patient’s rheumatoid arthritis. But just two days after the state’s abortion ban took effect last month, a pharmacy denied the teen’s refill. The reason: In a higher dosage, methotrexate — a drug used to treat some cancers, arthritis and a slew of autoimmune diseases — can also induce abortions and terminate ectopic pregnancies, though that’s not its most common use, Power told The Washington Post.”

Arizona’s 1901 law bans abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest and even threatens health care providers with prison time for providing vital reproductive care. These extreme laws being pushed by Republican lawmakers create additional unnecessary steps for dispensing basic medications for chronically ill patients. 

Washington Post: “Medicines that treat conditions from cancer to autoimmune diseases to ulcers can also end a pregnancy or cause birth defects. As a result, doctors and pharmacists in more than a dozen states with strict abortion restrictions must suddenly navigate whether and when to order such drugs because they could be held criminally liable and lose their licenses for prescribing some of them to pregnant women.”

Washington Post: “Even if they can show their patients suffer from conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, some doctors worry they could be prosecuted for prescribing such drugs to a patient with an unintended pregnancy. Such patients are also at greater risk because they can no longer seek abortions in their home states should they accidentally become pregnant while taking such drugs — no matter how grievous the injuries to the developing fetus.”

Washington Post: “Although her daughter’s next refill isn’t scheduled for another month, Preble said she is already dreading the possibility of another denial. ‘These laws are just too extreme and don’t take into account all the different scenarios that people are going through,’ she said.”

Let’s be clear – women, and the freedom to choose, are victims of the GOP’s attempt to cling to power. Americans cannot afford the GOP’s dangerous, anti-choice agenda, and it’s critical Americans know this is what is at stake come November. The freedom to make basic health care decisions is on the ballot.

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