The Washington Post reports on “the rise of a covert, international network delivering tens of thousands of abortion pills” to states where abortion is banned. In any other context, funneling illegal drugs into the United States from Mexico would be an issue for the FBI, not for sympathetic journalists from a mainstream outlet.
The system could upend Republican plans for a post-Roe America. Despite the strict abortion bans that have taken effect in over a dozen states, some antiabortion leaders fear that the flow of abortion pills could help make abortion more accessible than it was before Roe fell. Las Libres, one of several Mexican groups at the center of the network, says its organization alone is on track to help terminate approximately 20,000 pregnancies this year in the United States. That amounts to about 20 percent of all legal abortions that took place in 2019 in the 13 states where abortion is now almost entirely banned.
To these activists, maximizing the number of abortions is more important than women’s safety or basic accountability. According to the Post, the groups “offer abortion pills without a prescription and, typically, without access to a medical professional — occasionally providing medication to those who say they’re at or beyond the FDA’s 10-week limit. To avoid detection in antiabortion states, the group also mails pills unmarked and unsealed, often in old bottles used previously for other medicines.”
As I’ve written before, the green-lighting of backstreet abortions is made even more explicit in Michigan’s Proposal 3, which would amend the state constitution and allow abortion on demand and up until birth. Prop 3 explicitly prevents the state of Michigan from taking “adverse action against someone for aiding or assisting a pregnant individual in exercising their right to reproductive freedom with their voluntary consent.”
The normal medical standard for patients is giving “informed consent.” The normal medical standard for clinicians is to have a license. The new abortion frenzy does away with both.