Desperate pleas and smuggled pills: A covert abortion network rises after Roe

[cigaretteman]

Monica had never used Reddit before. But sitting at her desk one afternoon in July — at least 10 weeks into an unwanted pregnancy in a state that had banned abortion — she didn’t know where else to turn.
“I need advice I am not prepared to have a child,” the 25-year-old wrote from her office, once everyone else had left for the day. She titled her post, “PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!”

Within hours, she got a private message from an anonymous Reddit user. If Monica sent her address, the person promised, they would mail abortion pills “asap for free.”
Monica didn’t know it at the time, but her Reddit post connected her to a new facet of the battle for abortion access: the rise of a covert, international network delivering tens of thousands of abortion pills in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down

The emerging network — fueled by the widespread availability of medication abortion — has made the illegal abortions of today simpler and safer than those of the pre-Roe era, remembered for its back alleys and coat hangers. Distinct from services that sell pills to patients on the internet, a growing army of community-based distributors is reaching pregnant women through word of mouth or social media to supply pills for free — though typically without the safeguards of medical oversight.


“You’re truly [an] angel,” Monica wrote in a string of messages reviewed by The Washington Post. “I think tonight will be the first night i will actually be able to sleep.”

This account of the illegal abortion movement that has grown quickly since the Supreme Court ruling is based on interviews with 16 people with firsthand knowledge of the operation, and includes on-the-ground reporting in four U.S. cities and Mexico. Many who spoke to The Post did so on the condition of anonymity to discuss activity that potentially breaks multiple laws, such as practicing medicine without a license and providing abortions in states where the procedure is banned. The Post was permitted to observe distributors handling pills in antiabortion states on the added condition that their locations not be identified.
Abortion is now banned in these states. See where laws have changed.
Those interviewed described a pipeline that typically begins in Mexico, where activist suppliers funded largely by private donors secure pills for free as in-kind donations or from international pharmacies for as little as $1.50 a dose. U.S. volunteers then receive the pills through the mail — often relying on legal experts to help minimize their risk — before distributing them to pregnant women in need.
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.


“Soon there will come a moment when we won’t be able to count any of this,” said Verónica Cruz Sánchez, the director of Las Libres, adding that the group works with a U.S.-based volunteer network that numbers about 250 and is “growing, growing, growing.”
The leader of another Mexico-based group that supplies pills, Red Necesito Abortar, said the elaborate volunteer structure was “like a spiderweb.”
“Once we get the pills into the U.S., they can distribute them across the whole country,” said Sandra Cardona Alanís, the group’s co-founder.

Most people interviewed for this story acknowledged that the network they are building is far from ideal, with participants taking legal and medical risks they would not face if abortion was still permitted nationwide.

The medication — a two-step regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol — was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000 with a prescription, for use during the first seven weeks of pregnancy, a limit that was then extended to 10 weeks in 2016. But people involved in the network described a process that goes beyond what the FDA has endorsed. Organizations like Las Libres 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.
Some experts worry that as demand soars and cross-border networks expand to include less credible suppliers, women could start to receive illegitimate pills that are ineffective or, worse, dangerous. Fake abortion pills have been circulating in other countries with strict antiabortion laws, said Guillermo Ortiz, an OB/GYN and senior medical adviser with Ipas Partners for Reproductive Justice, an international abortion rights nonprofit.
“It’s scary,” he said. If women don’t know how to recognize real abortion pills, “it could cause huge harm.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/illegal-abortion-pill-network/

 

[cigaretteman]

Other experts are less skeptical. Kristyn Brandi, a doctor and spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading professional organization for OB/GYNs, said she feels confident that patients can carry out abortions safely without medical supervision — as long as the pills they receive are clearly labeled.
“Medication abortion is one of the safest processes that you can go through,” she said. “Regardless of where you get that medication, based on the science … what’s happening in your body shouldn’t be any different.”
Monica’s abortion pills arrived in the mail on a Friday afternoon, hidden inside a cat flea medication box. While the pills themselves were sealed and labeled, Monica’s boyfriend said he wasn’t sure if she should take them.
“What if they’re fake?” he recalled asking. He’d recently read news reports of other drugs that had been laced with fentanyl.
“What if they’re sending you something that isn’t even the abortion pill?”
By that point, Monica — who relayed her experience to The Post in real-time texts and calls, and then later in a lengthy interview at her home — had known about her pregnancy for over a month. She knew she wanted to have kids one day, but she and her boyfriend lived paycheck to paycheck, without health insurance. At the end of the month, they’d sometimes get down to their last $40 — and have to decide between groceries and gas.
Without the money or time to get an abortion out of state, Monica had tried to give herself a miscarriage — first with mugwort tea, an herbal remedy she read about online, then with a heavy night of drinking. When none of that worked, she turned to Reddit.
“I’m scared, too,” she said she told her boyfriend.
“But this is my only option.”

A nurse joins the network​

Two weeks earlier, on the day Roe fell, a nurse in a different city rushed from room to room at the abortion clinic where she worked — frantically telling patients where they could order illegal pills now that their state had banned abortion.
“Do you have Insta?” she asked at least 20 patients that day, waiting as they pulled up their Instagram accounts.
She instructed each patient to follow an online resource called Plan C, which compiles a list of sources where patients can buy abortion pills on the internet. The nurse reviewed various options, including Aid Access, the prominent online service run by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, as well as various online pharmacies that sell abortion pills illegally to people in antiabortion states.
‘We’re done’: Chaos and tears as an abortion clinic abruptly shuts down
The next day, one of those patients found the nurse in the grocery store.
“I have the money,” the woman said, her eyes desperate. “Will you buy the pills for me?”


The nurse couldn’t remember the patient’s name, but she remembered other details the woman had shared about her life — pleading in Spanish in the clinic hallway five hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. A mother of four, the woman was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico with a history of severe pregnancy complications and a Catholic husband who did not believe in abortion.
She couldn’t order the pills herself, she explained, because she didn’t speak English and had no reliable access to the internet. If the pills came to her home, she also worried her husband would find them.
Hyper-aware of the other grocery carts moving around her, the nurse considered all she might lose if she helped the woman and got caught. Where she lived — a Republican-led state in the South — she knew she could be stripped of her nursing license for distributing abortion pills. Maybe even go to jail.
The nurse promised herself she would do it just this once.
“I’ll tell you when I have them,” she said to the woman.

Securing the pills was easier than the nurse ever imagined: She called a friend, who sent her the number for Las Libres. The organization, she learned, had been working with many volunteers like her — helping patients who, for one reason or another, couldn’t buy pills on their own.
Many patients had never heard of Plan C or Aid Access. Some couldn’t afford the advertised price tag of $100 or more. Then there were patients like the woman in the grocery store, desperate for pills but without a safe place to receive them.
On the phone with Las Libres, the nurse had requested just one set of abortion pills — enough to help her former patient. But, she said, the package arrived three days later with the means to end five pregnancies.


Las Libres soon followed up with the address for a woman in a different city.
“Can you help her?” a Las Libres activist asked over text.
The nurse, in her late 20s, thought about the lawmakers who had ushered in these laws — and those who had implemented similar restrictions years ago in Mexico, where she’d had to secure her own illegal abortion at age 16. She still remembered her feet in the stirrups in an empty apartment building. The unsure medical student who performed the abortion. The speculum and dilator boiling in a pot of water on the stove.
“I want those politicians to feel powerless,” the nurse said of her decision to join the ranks of the illegal abortion movement. “I want them to feel the same way my patients feel.”
She mailed her second set of pills the next day.
Other experts are less skeptical. Kristyn Brandi, a doctor and spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading professional organization for OB/GYNs, said she feels confident that patients can carry out abortions safely without medical supervision — as long as the pills they receive are clearly labeled.
“Medication abortion is one of the safest processes that you can go through,” she said. “Regardless of where you get that medication, based on the science … what’s happening in your body shouldn’t be any different.”
Monica’s abortion pills arrived in the mail on a Friday afternoon, hidden inside a cat flea medication box. While the pills themselves were sealed and labeled, Monica’s boyfriend said he wasn’t sure if she should take them.
“What if they’re fake?” he recalled asking. He’d recently read news reports of other drugs that had been laced with fentanyl.
“What if they’re sending you something that isn’t even the abortion pill?”
By that point, Monica — who relayed her experience to The Post in real-time texts and calls, and then later in a lengthy interview at her home — had known about her pregnancy for over a month. She knew she wanted to have kids one day, but she and her boyfriend lived paycheck to paycheck, without health insurance. At the end of the month, they’d sometimes get down to their last $40 — and have to decide between groceries and gas.
Without the money or time to get an abortion out of state, Monica had tried to give herself a miscarriage — first with mugwort tea, an herbal remedy she read about online, then with a heavy night of drinking. When none of that worked, she turned to Reddit.
“I’m scared, too,” she said she told her boyfriend.
“But this is my only option.”

​

 

[franklinman]

Other experts are less skeptical. Kristyn Brandi, a doctor and spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading professional organization for OB/GYNs, said she feels confident that patients can carry out abortions safely without medical supervision — as long as the pills they receive are clearly labeled.
“Medication abortion is one of the safest processes that you can go through,” she said. “Regardless of where you get that medication, based on the science … what’s happening in your body shouldn’t be any different.”
Monica’s abortion pills arrived in the mail on a Friday afternoon, hidden inside a cat flea medication box. While the pills themselves were sealed and labeled, Monica’s boyfriend said he wasn’t sure if she should take them.
“What if they’re fake?” he recalled asking. He’d recently read news reports of other drugs that had been laced with fentanyl.
“What if they’re sending you something that isn’t even the abortion pill?”
By that point, Monica — who relayed her experience to The Post in real-time texts and calls, and then later in a lengthy interview at her home — had known about her pregnancy for over a month. She knew she wanted to have kids one day, but she and her boyfriend lived paycheck to paycheck, without health insurance. At the end of the month, they’d sometimes get down to their last $40 — and have to decide between groceries and gas.
Without the money or time to get an abortion out of state, Monica had tried to give herself a miscarriage — first with mugwort tea, an herbal remedy she read about online, then with a heavy night of drinking. When none of that worked, she turned to Reddit.
“I’m scared, too,” she said she told her boyfriend.
“But this is my only option.”

A nurse joins the network​

Two weeks earlier, on the day Roe fell, a nurse in a different city rushed from room to room at the abortion clinic where she worked — frantically telling patients where they could order illegal pills now that their state had banned abortion.
“Do you have Insta?” she asked at least 20 patients that day, waiting as they pulled up their Instagram accounts.
She instructed each patient to follow an online resource called Plan C, which compiles a list of sources where patients can buy abortion pills on the internet. The nurse reviewed various options, including Aid Access, the prominent online service run by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, as well as various online pharmacies that sell abortion pills illegally to people in antiabortion states.
‘We’re done’: Chaos and tears as an abortion clinic abruptly shuts down
The next day, one of those patients found the nurse in the grocery store.
“I have the money,” the woman said, her eyes desperate. “Will you buy the pills for me?”


The nurse couldn’t remember the patient’s name, but she remembered other details the woman had shared about her life — pleading in Spanish in the clinic hallway five hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. A mother of four, the woman was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico with a history of severe pregnancy complications and a Catholic husband who did not believe in abortion.
She couldn’t order the pills herself, she explained, because she didn’t speak English and had no reliable access to the internet. If the pills came to her home, she also worried her husband would find them.
Hyper-aware of the other grocery carts moving around her, the nurse considered all she might lose if she helped the woman and got caught. Where she lived — a Republican-led state in the South — she knew she could be stripped of her nursing license for distributing abortion pills. Maybe even go to jail.
The nurse promised herself she would do it just this once.
“I’ll tell you when I have them,” she said to the woman.

Securing the pills was easier than the nurse ever imagined: She called a friend, who sent her the number for Las Libres. The organization, she learned, had been working with many volunteers like her — helping patients who, for one reason or another, couldn’t buy pills on their own.
Many patients had never heard of Plan C or Aid Access. Some couldn’t afford the advertised price tag of $100 or more. Then there were patients like the woman in the grocery store, desperate for pills but without a safe place to receive them.
On the phone with Las Libres, the nurse had requested just one set of abortion pills — enough to help her former patient. But, she said, the package arrived three days later with the means to end five pregnancies.


Las Libres soon followed up with the address for a woman in a different city.
“Can you help her?” a Las Libres activist asked over text.
The nurse, in her late 20s, thought about the lawmakers who had ushered in these laws — and those who had implemented similar restrictions years ago in Mexico, where she’d had to secure her own illegal abortion at age 16. She still remembered her feet in the stirrups in an empty apartment building. The unsure medical student who performed the abortion. The speculum and dilator boiling in a pot of water on the stove.
“I want those politicians to feel powerless,” the nurse said of her decision to join the ranks of the illegal abortion movement. “I want them to feel the same way my patients feel.”
She mailed her second set of pills the next day.
Other experts are less skeptical. Kristyn Brandi, a doctor and spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading professional organization for OB/GYNs, said she feels confident that patients can carry out abortions safely without medical supervision — as long as the pills they receive are clearly labeled.
“Medication abortion is one of the safest processes that you can go through,” she said. “Regardless of where you get that medication, based on the science … what’s happening in your body shouldn’t be any different.”
Monica’s abortion pills arrived in the mail on a Friday afternoon, hidden inside a cat flea medication box. While the pills themselves were sealed and labeled, Monica’s boyfriend said he wasn’t sure if she should take them.
“What if they’re fake?” he recalled asking. He’d recently read news reports of other drugs that had been laced with fentanyl.
“What if they’re sending you something that isn’t even the abortion pill?”
By that point, Monica — who relayed her experience to The Post in real-time texts and calls, and then later in a lengthy interview at her home — had known about her pregnancy for over a month. She knew she wanted to have kids one day, but she and her boyfriend lived paycheck to paycheck, without health insurance. At the end of the month, they’d sometimes get down to their last $40 — and have to decide between groceries and gas.
Without the money or time to get an abortion out of state, Monica had tried to give herself a miscarriage — first with mugwort tea, an herbal remedy she read about online, then with a heavy night of drinking. When none of that worked, she turned to Reddit.
“I’m scared, too,” she said she told her boyfriend.
“But this is my only option.”

​

Where there is a will, there is a way. There is a way to change any situation if you look hard enough.

 

[FrederickMahoney]

I totally disagree with the abortion ban. It's only my opinion, but it can increase the number of illegal operations or pill sellers. I've read a lot of information about this, including https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/pro-life-abortion/, and this decision can cause only negative effects. We also have a discussion about this at my college. Women must have the right to choose. I don't understand why a democratic society violates this right.

 

[fsu1jreed]

I totally disagree with the abortion ban. It's only my opinion, but it can increase the number of illegal operations or pill sellers. Women must have the right to choose. I don't understand why a democratic society violates this right.

Because of fascists trying to take over said government