After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, red states raced to restrict abortion, as Florida did yesterday with a new ban after six weeks of pregnancy. It was reasonable to expect the number of abortions in the U.S. to decline. Instead, it appears to have risen slightly. Why? One factor is pills prescribed online, which now make up one in six abortions.
The dynamic encapsulates a broader trend: The combination of a relatively new technology (the web) and an old one (the mail) has made it easier for Americans to bypass laws that they don’t like.
It’s true about abortion but also other issues, some of which liberals and conservatives see very differently. Drugmakers in China and India often ship the narcotic fentanyl and its ingredients to the U.S. Gun owners assemble untraceable firearms, known as ghost guns, from parts ordered online or made with 3-D printers, another relatively new technology.
Today’s newsletter will cover some of the ways that technology has outpaced the law.
Broader trend
People have embraced these new workarounds. Nearly two-thirds of abortions are carried out with pills (most still from in-person clinics), up from a little more than half in 2020. Fentanyl’s spread has caused overdose deaths to more than double in the U.S. since 2014. The number of ghost guns seized at crime scenes increased more than tenfold from 2016 to 2021.
Officials have enacted measures to stop shipments of abortion pills, fentanyl and ghost gun parts. They have a few tools to inspect the mail, like drug-sniffing dogs and X-ray machines. But they simply don’t have the time or resources to sift through the hundreds of millions of letters, packages and other mail delivered each day.
With abortion pills, states face another hurdle: The federal government runs the U.S. Postal Service and regulates the mail, so states can’t intercept letters or packages on their own. And while the Biden administration wants to control the supply of fentanyl and ghost guns, it has supported access to abortion pills through the mail. (A future administration could take a different approach.)
States with abortion bans could try to get around federal oversight by going after the people sending the mail. But other states have made that difficult by enacting legal protections for abortion providers who ship pills to other states.
Uneven access
New technologies can help Americans get around a restriction, but that doesn’t make the law toothless. Some can’t evade it. Women without much access to the internet or other resources might struggle to get an abortion pill and carry more births to term. Those who can easily get pills online might find abortion more accessible than ever.
Florida’s six-week abortion ban could offer an example of the unequal effects. Until yesterday, the state was among the least restrictive in the Southeast. So women from across the region traveled there, as my colleague Margot Sanger-Katz, who covers health care policy, told me. Now, women in Florida and across the South will have to travel much farther (as these maps show).
Some of those women won’t be able to take time off work or pay for a trip hundreds of miles away to get an abortion in person. And they might not have internet access, a reliable home address or the knowledge to order pills online.
Yet for others, an abortion is now just a few clicks away. And as more groups work to offer the pills at lower prices, more women may gain access. In that scenario, the total number of abortions could continue to increase.
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