You can get mail-order abortion pills

The NY Times reports:

True, in a post-Roe America, some women would be able to get abortion-inducing medications that weren’t available the last time abortion was criminalized. (Misoprostol, which is also used to treat ulcers, can be ordered online.)

The article cites a previous NY Times article:

“A couple weeks ago, we Googled ‘abortion pills’ and tried ordering from a few of the sites that came up,” she said.

The pills, misoprostol and mifepristone, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use by a licensed provider to end a pregnancy within the first 10 weeks, or what is known as “medical abortion.” Mifepristone works by blocking the effects of progesterone, a hormone without which the lining of the uterus begins to break down, while misoprostol, to be taken 24 to 48 hours later, induces contractions of the uterus that expel its contents.

Medical abortion now accounts for close to half of all legal abortions in the United States. Serious complications are rare, but the risk increases as the pregnancy progresses, and it isn’t clear yet how far into pregnancy the drugs should be used.

With the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000, many people believed the reproductive revolution had arrived; ...

The F.D.A. warns against purchasing the drugs from online vendors, but women in the United States are doing it anyway. Increasingly, advocates of access to the drugs say, women are turning to the internet to procure the pills for use in their homes.

If I understand this correctly, a pregnant woman can easily buy a safe and effective abortion pill mail-order, with no prescription required.

The recent anti-abortion state laws appear to have the purpose of generating a test case for the US Supreme Court, and not to actually make abortion unavailable. Abortions will still be available by mail-order abortion pills, and by bus tickets to nearby states.

I doubt that these laws will take effect, or that they will get Supreme Court review. So it is a lot of fuss over nothing.

If the states wanted the laws to be more anti-woman, they could have made it a crime for a woman to get an abortion, or given the expectant father some rights in the matter, or allowed the expectant father to disavow paternity. Women who get abortions are avoiding maternity, and it is sometimes argued that a more sex-neutral law would give men a similar opportunity to avoid paternity. The laws do none of those things.

You might say that any law against abortion is anti-woman, but women are against abortion as much as men are, and maybe more.

In other news, I see that the Harvey Weinstein accusers are settling their claims for $44M, to be paid by his insurance company. Yes, the whole story was just extortion. First the women used him to get movie roles, and then they fleeced him for insurance money.