(LifeSiteNews) — The American Life League (ALL) published a new report on the proliferation of chemical abortion across the United States, finding that the Biden administration’s illegal authorization of distributing abortion pills by mail means no state can be abortion-free regardless of their pro-life laws.
Released Wednesday, ALL’s “Beneath the Surface: Exposing the Abortion Pill Drug Cartel” details an “ongoing pill network that is funneling these drugs in from foreign countries to states with so-called ‘abortion bans,’” not unlike narcotic drug cartels.
In January 2023, the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declared that a provision of the 1873 Comstock Act making it illegal for the United States Postal Service to deliver any “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion” did not mean what it said.
OLC maintained that abortion pills may be freely mailed, delivered, and received “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” And because “there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may use these drugs, including to produce an abortion, without violating state law,” the “mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”
In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the legality of the move (as well as to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s prior approval of abortion drugs) on the grounds that the plaintiffs supposedly lacked standing, leaving the door open for future challenges to possibly fare better.
According to ALL’s report, the volunteer “community networks” it identified ship abortion pills to 28 states and five U.S. territories for free, albeit with a non-binding suggestion for a donation. A representative example of these networks is the Mexico-based Las Libres, which states, “We recommend using a Proton Mail account for security (yours and ours),” with instructions for how to open one. It requires only a first name and the first day of a user’s last menstrual period. “No other information is needed,” it says.
ALL noted that even the New York Times has acknowledged that such services often use abortion pills from other countries, which carry even more risks than those sourced from conventional medical processes and lacks verification that the pills are not laced with dangerous foreign substances, or even that they could be different pills entirely.
In case of emergency complications, Las Libres goes so far as to advise customers to hide from ER doctors and nurses that they had a self-induced chemical abortion, and “to be on the safe side, you should erase messages and emails about your abortion from your phone.”
Another initiative, the National Women’s Health Network’s Plan C, directs teenage girls hoping to flout parental knowledge or consent to “get abortion pills mailed to you from Aid Access,” which “operate(s) from states with special laws that do not require them to” notify parents, as well as instructions for how to obtain a judicial bypass in states that allow them, through the help of “(o)rganizations like If/When/How, the ACLU, and Jane’s Due Process.”
The report goes on to detail that 36 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands allow abortion pills to be prescribed during in-person clinics and that virtual appointments can be used to prescribe abortion pills in the remaining 14 thanks to Biden’s rule change working in conjunction with the seven states that have laws shielding abortionists’ ability to prescribe the pills to be delivered in states where they are illegal.
Additionally, Plan C advises abortion seekers about websites that sell abortion pills without a prescription for anywhere from $30 to $500. It admits the pills sold by these sites “are not regulated or inspected by the U.S. government,” but claims to “regularly” test them by buying pills and subjecting them to laboratory testing.
“(T)he latest reports showed that 63% of abortions are committed via these pills,” ALL added. “However, with this percentage only coming from ‘in-network healthcare systems,’ this does not include the abortions committed through the cartel networks. Therefore, ALL can safely assume that rather than pills accounting for 63% of all abortions, the number is significantly higher, and we estimate it is closer to 80% or 90%.”
The report ends with the sad conclusion that “the claim of the abortion-free state, or pro-life state, is a myth. As long as the abortion pill regimen is trafficked across our nation’s borders into heavily restricted states, abortion numbers will continue to rise. And as there is no required reporting, we will continue to be left in the dark regarding how many women’s and children’s lives are claimed by the abortion pill crisis.”
While both candidates in this fall’s upcoming presidential election have many significant differences, including on abortion policy, this is one area that is not likely to change with either outcome. Former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump said in August that he would not reverse Biden’s approval of mailing abortion pills.
While pro-life laws have reduced the number of surgical abortions in the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the proliferation of abortion pills across state lines has been essential to keeping abortion-on-demand thriving.
Ever since Roe’s fall, the abortion lobby has also been working feverishly to cancel out the deterrent effects of pro-life laws by legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, placing abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.