After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some 16 Republican-dominated states have imposed near-total bans on abortion. In response, access to abortion pills has grown.
In this article in VOX, veteran journalist Rachel M. Cohen describes the numerous organizations that provide telehealth sessions with doctors who provide prescriptions, as well as supplying abortion pills. In addition, several Democrat-dominated states have passed shield laws to protect doctors in their state who advise women in red states.
A network of like-minded groups have filled the gap created by the Dobbs decision, making these pills easily available and inexpensive.
Cohen writes:
Eighteen months after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, and with a new Supreme Court challenge pending against the abortion medication mifepristone, confusion abounds about access to reproductive health care in America.
Births are up, but so are abortions since Dobbs.
Taking a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy was already the most common method for abortion in the United States before the Dobbs decision, partly due to its safety record, its lower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy. The popularity of medication abortion has only grown since then: A poll released in March found majorities of Americans support keeping medication abortion legal and allowing women to use it at home to end an early-stage pregnancy. Another survey found 59 percent of voters disapprove of overturning the FDA’s approval of abortion medication, including 72 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and 40 percent of Republicans.
Immediately after Dobbs, the only way to obtain the pills by mail was through international sources, which took weeks to arrive. Now, however, the pills are available by mail in the U.S. and will arrive in days.
The e-commerce marketplace for abortion medication has expanded, and the cost for pills has fallen dramatically
Outside of telemedicine options, there are over two dozen e-commerce websites that sell and ship medication abortion to the US. This international supply chain has grown significantly since Dobbs and most of these sites do not require prescriptions and do not require people to upload their IDs or have medical consultations. Plan C has vetted 26 of these sites, including testing their pills to ensure they’re “real products of acceptable quality.”
The cost of the pills has dropped significantly, some for as little as $42-47.
Volunteer groups have sprung up, with some offering the pills for free.
Community support groups, also known as “companion networks,” have grown since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and now actively provide free abortion pills to people living in states with bans on reproductive health care. These groups, some of which can be found on sites like Plan C and Red State Access, mail medication abortion and offer doula support.
But what happens if the Supreme Court limits access to mail-order abortion pills?
While abortion advocates doubt the justices will go so far as to pull mifepristone off the market, as a federal judge in Texas attempted to do earlier in 2023, they are bracing for the possibility that the court might reimpose medically unnecessary restrictions on access, like bans on prescribing mifepristone via telemedicine.
Even if that happens, though, most of the aforementioned options for accessing medication abortion would remain intact. It’s not clear if the FDA would even abide by such a Supreme Court ruling, but if it did, providers using shield laws could still legally ship misoprostol to patients in banned states.
“A Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t affect the community-based networks, ProgressiveRx, or the e-commerce websites that sell pills at all, and so there would still be ways of getting mifepristone and misoprostol in the mail,” Wells said. “The Supreme Court could affect services like Aid Access and Abuzz, but they could also switch to misoprostol-only abortions and that’s what they’re planning to do.”
The rapid growth in the number of ways to access abortion pills and the planning to protect access in the future demonstrate that Dobbs will prove to be like prohibiting the sale or consumption of liquor. When the population has grown accustomed to consuming alcohol or getting an abortion legally, it will be impossible to ban it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I urge readers here to follow Jessica Valenti’s substack Abortion Every Day. She and her researcher Grace Haley are closely following the attacks on women’s bodily autonomy as the religious right seeks to return us to a state of barefoot and pregnant. Valenti has been invited to present at a Senate hearing tomorrow.
https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-is-headed-to-the
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Link to the Senate hearing:
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Alcohol isn’t the only failure to control what people consume that extremists don’t approve of.
Marijuana is another one that hasn’t stopped anyone that wants it. And Nixon, with Reagan doubling down, declared war on Marijuana and other recreational drugs that skyrocketed the US prison population from about a 250,000 annual average, to more than 2,000,000 in a short period of time where that number has been stuck for decades.
The United States has the highest prison population on the planet, even more than China that has a population more than four times larger.
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One of the biggest criminal justice myths is that the “War on Drugs” is the main or even a major driver of the explosion in prison populations over the last 50 years. It’s not true. Only around 15% of prisoners in state prisons — federal prisons hold only about 15% of all prisoners in the U.S., and that dips to under 10% if you include jails — are there for drug offenses. And of the inmates in state prison for drug offenses, over 95% of them are there for trafficking, not drug use.
I’ve made this point a thousand times — including many times on this blog — but people just ignore it, as if they’re just too wedded to the idea that the war on drugs is the reason there are so many prisoners in the U.S. to reconsider it.
Below is one time I made the comment on this blog. Revising that comment thread now, I noticed for the first time that Richard Rothstein made a correction to one of his reports based on my comment. So I guess not everybody ignores this point.
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That whole exchange was impressive, FLERP!
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There are many other reasons to hate the so-called “war” on drugs.
First, it pushes drug manufacturing underground where it cannot be regulated, which leads to adulterated drugs. Wired magazine once sent people into nightclubs throughout New York City to buy tabs of ecstasy. Then they had these tested. Only 2 of 100 tabs they bought were mostly ecstasy. The others were adulterated, often with very dangerous stuff. Consider the current epidemic of deaths from poorly manufactured and weighed fentanyl. People die unnecessarily because of this, often young people with their whole lives ahead of them.
Second, the so-called war has been totally ineffective.
Third, it is a jobs creation program for drug cartels like Sinoloa and the Hell’s Angels.
Fourth, because the “war” pushes drug usage underground, users are harder to find and identify and treat. So, intervention is greatly hampered.
Fifth, the so-called “war” is breathtakingly expensive even though it is so ineffective.
Sixth, those warred upon are mostly black and brown people, who are much more likely to be arrested than are white people for the same offenses receive much more severe sentences.
You can read a LOT of good stuff about the success of Portugal’s decriminalization of drugs on the CATO website. I highly recommend this.
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Like with most policy issues, drug policy isn’t about solutions, it’s about tradeoffs. There’s no free lunch.
I was in Lisbon in the early 90s. There were blocks that resembled Kensington in Philly or the worst blocks in San Francisco. They turned that around with what always seemed to me to be a smart combination of decriminalization plus mandatory treatment and zero tolerance by police for public drug use. U.S. progressive and libertarian decriminalization advocates never seem to think those other elements are important, but I think they are essential.
Unfortunately Portugal has been having serious trouble lately.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/
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https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/
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Here’s a gift link to that WaPo article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/
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Nope. It’s behind a paywall.
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Here’s another issue: Often that violent offense is related to a drug-trafficking operation, e.g., gang rivalry over a disputed territory. So, as a practical matter, it would be impossible to separate these into distinct categories–drug here, violent there. The charge might be homicide, but the 6-year-old might well have been killed by a stray bullet from a drive-by meant as retaliation against a rival drug-trafficking gang.
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And as the article I linked to above says, one reason why there has been a recent small reversal in the MAJOR benefits that Portugal got from its decriminalization coupled with intervention programs is that in a time of economic austerity, Portugal CUT BACK ON ITS PROGRAMS FOR DRUG ADDICTS. So, it’s not because decriminalization doesn’t work. It’s because if you cut the associated health and social and work integration programs, the whole thing falls apart.
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The article you cited also says that funding for the necessary rehabilitation that accompanies decriminalization has dried up in Portugal. That’s why there has been a recent increase in drug usage AFTER DRAMATIC DECLINES AFTER DECRIMINALIZATION. Decriminalization accompanied by LEGAL AND REGULATED production of drugs would mean THE END TO THE MAJOR SOURCE OF INCOME FOR CRIMINAL GANGS AND CARTELS.
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https://wapo.st/3Hkrbk3
Maybe this one will work.
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As someone who literally sees people steps from my front door (often blocking it directly) shooting up and/or in a drug stupor every single time I leave or return home, I could not be more opposed to legalizing hard drugs like meth, heroin, crack, etc. for recreational use.
There are downsides to criminalization, but these are the tradeoffs I referenced.
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Here’s the relevant portion of some research I quoted in that comment:
In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders, and a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge, at least not as their “primary” charge. These results pose a challenge to those who wish to aggressively scale back incarceration, since the current politics of reducing sanctions for drug offenders is less complicated than that for reducing punishment for violent or property offenders. Reforming drug statutes is easier, but doing so will likely not effect significant change in the overall incarceration rate.
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