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Notes -
5th circuit court halts abortion pill access by mail
For various legal reasons, although SCOTUS ruled against universal injunctions in Trump v Casa, now no one gets to mail pills anywhere until the FDA completes its safety review, even though Louisiana is the one complaining that women keep managing to get abortions anyways. This is lame and we should just have the opposing states fight (in court). Blue states have already enacted "shield laws" and red states have countered with "We can sue you anyways" laws.
This is all a bit of theater.
As long as there is a die-hard group of pro-choice activists willing to both spend money and potentially break the law to enable women in red states to access abortion, you would need draconic customs inspections between US states to block that.
Both mifepristone and misoprostol are from the 1980s and in wide use all over the world. I would assume they can be sourced in bulk so cheap that most of the costs per abortion are actually the shipping costs. There are likely sufficient activists willing to enable abortions in red states that they are willing to do the logistics for free and pay the shipping costs. It will be next to impossible for a red state to track down the senders and secure a conviction against them if they are based in blue states and local law enforcement decides that this particular violation of FDA regulations is not worth their time.
From the anti-ICE protests, this would be exactly the sort of grassroot activism I would expect the blue tribe to excel at.
And the activists could certainly make the case that any woman can technically terminate her pregnancy, they are simply providing a safer alternative to coat hangers as a public health service.
Short of new federal legislation, I do not think this can easily be changed. Banning at-home pregnancy tests would not suffice, it would simply lead to abortions occurring later. I mean, the red states could try to introduce mandatory monthly pregnancy testing for all fertile women (so they can launch a homicide investigation whenever a woman who was previously pregnant becomes non-pregnant without a baby to show for it), but even the current SCOTUS might frown at that.
Even without activists there just aren’t that many pregnant woman today who absolutely cannot make a single one-day trip to the next state over to get an abortion. Teen pregnancy rates continue to fall through the floor, so they mostly aren’t minors. Transportation has gotten cheap enough and government assistance plentiful enough that it’s not financially impossible. Like the overturn of Roe I suspect the reaction will be muted when most women realize this doesn’t really affect them personally.
The nearest abortions that are accessible for a woman in Louisiana is likely in Kansas, not a one day trip.
I've driven from (southwest) Texas to Montana in a day; surely a motivated individual with a car could make it happen? Planes also exist, if one is not truly destitute.
I assume there exists some pro-choice charity that would pay for plane tickets, even if one was destitute.
The dollar per case amounts here are really high here, which costs a lot of money and creates a lot of opportunity for fraud (i.e., free trip on the pretext of an abortion, or just cash in the plane tickets). Preventing this fraud would create a lot of work and create a degree of formality that would make it much easier to be sued/prosecuted.
Mailing the pills is a perfect solution.
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