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.

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.

“Methotrexate is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Traci Poole, a practicing pharmacist and faculty member at Belmont University College of Pharmacy in Nashville. “If you are of childbearing age, are you going to be denied medications that could potentially interfere with a pregnancy?”

Update (Ed): It’s worth noting another part of this story, though:

Antiabortion activists, for their part, reject that view. They say they’re troubled by accounts like Hubbard’s because they never intended to restrict drugs like methotrexate to women with chronic health conditions.

Katie Glenn, state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an antiabortion advocacy group, said doctors and pharmacists should not have any concerns about prescribing those drugs to their patients, as long as they are not doing so to terminate a pregnancy.

“Intent is the key here,” Glenn said. “If you’re a rheumatologist, you’re not doing abortions. If you’ve never prescribed methotrexate for abortion, you’re free to continue prescribing it as you were.”

The law is not going to go after rheumatologists and pharmacists filling normal prescriptions. It might go after abortion clinics that try to exploit those drugs to perform abortions.