(LifeSiteNews) – The online sale of unauthorized abortion pills is “booming” since the fall of Roe v. Wade, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal.
WSJ reported that numerous websites offering abortion pills without prescriptions have popped up in the wake of June’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe and restoring states’ ability to make their own abortion laws.
The sites’ credentials are questionable at best; some are registered in countries such as Kazakhstan, India, and Australia, and others list associations with individuals and pharmaceutical manufacturers that say they have no knowledge of or affiliation with them. But their overseas nature means they are beyond the reach of American laws, such as federal statutes making it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to distribute the means of abortion via U.S. mail.
However, while that means most of the websites are likely safe from legal jeopardy, recipients in the United States could still be exposing themselves to prosecution. More significantly, they would be assuming significant medical risks – there’s no guarantee what pills women would actually be ingesting from these sites, or do they come with medical screenings of their risk factors or instruction or oversight on how to take them, or how to recognize or react to complications.
“You don’t know what you’re getting,” Al Carter, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, told the Journal.
“Drugs that have circumvented regulatory safeguards may be contaminated, counterfeit, contain varying amounts of active ingredients, or contain different ingredients altogether,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Food & Drug Administration added.
This is likely acceptable to the websites’ proprietors, however, who are profiting handsomely from the interest of abortion seekers. WSJ reported that these black-market pills are selling for up to $500 per pack, with one site boasting that its sales have doubled since Roe’s overturn.
In a sign of the sites’ awareness of the underhanded nature of their service, one woman told WSJ that the site she ordered from warned her not to tell PayPal what she was purchasing or the service “may take legal action against you.”
With the fall of Roe suddenly making surgical abortions illegal in many states, abortion activists have suggested mailing abortion pill from pro-abortion states to pro-life ones as a way to circumvent abortion bans. In June, U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services Xavier Becerra declared it a “national imperative” to protect and increase “access” to abortion pills.
The federal laws against mailing or importing abortion pills complicate that plan, though a pro-life presidential administration would be required to enforce them. Online counterfeit providers present an additional challenge, though it remains to be seen how widely American abortion activists will embrace these sellers.
Across the country, abortion giant Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions and/or closed locations in reaction to Roe’s fall, and pro-life attorneys general have declared their intentions to enforce their states’ duly-enacted abortion prohibitions.
But leftists prosecutors in dozens of localities have vowed not to enforce such laws, and pro-abortion activists have refocused efforts on supporting interstate travel for abortion and enshrining “rights” to abortion in state constitutions, ensuring that work and debate will continue over the prospect of banning abortion nationally. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has called for electing more Democrats to Congress to support codifying a “right” to abortion-on-demand in federal law.