Underground Abortion Networks are thriving. mail's the reason

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

The Supreme Court Can’t Stop Underground Abortion Networks. And They’re Thriving.
“No matter what laws and bans are out there, people are going to find a way to get access to the care that they need.”

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Traffic on Plan C, a website that provides information about how to get abortion pills, has roughly doubled every time there’s a new development in this case, co-founder Elisa Wells told VICE News.

“These systems are only strengthening in the face of these unjust rulings. They’ve been around for years and have not been able to be stopped in a large-scale way,” said Wells, adding that Plan C is constantly being contacted by new entities that want to ship abortion pills. “The opportunities for buying pills have only increased over time.”

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For obvious reasons, it is profoundly difficult to track how many people have undergone self-managed abortions. But in the last six months of 2022, after the overturning of Roe in June, at least 20,000 packets of abortion pills were shipped to people in the United States through clandestine channels, VICE News reported earlier this year.

Abortion rights advocates are particularly fearful that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, may take the unlikely step of commenting or even ruling on the Comstock Act, a long-defunct 1800s anti-obscenity law that anti-abortion activists are now trying to use to ban the mailing of all abortion-related materials. This would amount to a nationwide ban on all in-clinic abortion methods, because clinics get their instruments and medications shipped to them.

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Nurse practitioner Christie Pitney, a midwife with Forward Midwifery and co-founder of Abortion Freedom Fund, a fund for telehealth abortions, told VICE News earlier this year that one of her “scariest thoughts” is that the government will start to search the mail for abortion pills. But the Postal Service already struggles to police illicit drugs: A 2018 report from the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General found that, out of 104 “drug product sites” surveyed by the office, 92 percent used the Postal Service—and almost half of those sites were evidently so confident that they could evade detection that they promised to re-ship lost packages through the Postal Services.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3g98/mifepristone-supreme-court-ruling-wont-stop-underground-abortion-pill-network

[ananda]

1. What worries me is the exodus of OB/GYN's from red states.

IOW, all female reproductive care will be at risk,
including the forced or unforced childbirth.