Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry approved a bill on Friday which increased regulations on the substances commonly used in abortion pills, requiring mothers and fathers to obtain prescriptions for the chemicals before they are used to murder their children.

Senate Bill 276 imposes between five and ten years in prison for anyone who attempts to use abortion-inducing drugs on a pregnant woman “without her knowledge or consent,” an action defined by the law as “coerced criminal abortion.” The sentences increase to between ten and twenty years in prison after the first trimester due to heightened health risks for the mother.

The statute nevertheless allows for abortion pills to be obtained with a prescription and clarifies that the law is not violated when “a pregnant woman” possesses “for her own consumption” mifepristone and misoprostol, the two substances commonly used in abortion pills.

Landry said in a statement about Senate Bill 276 that the measure “protects women across Louisiana” and criminalizes “the use of an abortion drug on an unsuspecting mother,” while pro-life groups such as Students for Life asserted the bill would “ensure that these dangerous drugs cannot be dispersed or distributed in the reckless manner they long have been.”

Critics of laws which exempt mothers from prosecution even when they willfully obtain abortions note that such measures have allowed for abortion pill use to increase in pro-life states where surgical abortion facilities have been shuttered. One study found that Louisiana saw the most rapid increase in abortion pill orders of any other state after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Brian Gunter, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Livingston, Louisiana, said in remarks to The Sentinel that the new legislation “specifically protects” self-managed abortion even as pro-life establishment leaders advertise the effort as “banning the abortion pill.”

“Let me be absolutely clear: Senate Bill 276 is another intentionally deceptive bill from the Louisiana pro-life establishment which pretends to prohibit abortion while actually protecting self-managed abortion,” the minister contended. “If you believe in the sanctity of human life, you should not celebrate the passage of Senate Bill 276. Instead, you should be grieved that we have yet another law which guarantees the legal right of women in Louisiana to murder their preborn children by self-managed abortion with immunity and impunity.”

Gunter and other Christian abortion abolitionists lobbied two years ago in Louisiana for a bill that would have applied existing state homicide laws to protect preborn children. Republican members of the Louisiana House ultimately opposed the legislation.

“Louisiana voters should accept nothing less than the abolition of abortion by granting equal protection to all preborn children: abortion is murder, and no one should be allowed to murder an innocent child, not even the mother,” Gunter continued. “The pro-life establishment in Louisiana is protecting self-managed abortion, and anyone who actually takes a few minutes to read their bills will easily and quickly discover this fact.”