Mailing it in

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 7th day of September, 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up: keeping abortion pills out of pro-life states.

Fifteen states protect unborn babies from abortion except for in limited circumstances. Many also specifically prohibit sending abortion pills through the mail. But are laws like these enough to keep abortion providers from sending the drugs to women in these states?

BUTLER: Here’s WORLD’s Life Beat reporter Leah Savas with our story.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: In some ways, the appointment Brittany Green had with a pregnancy center client in July wasn’t that unusual.

GREEN: The girl that I just met with a week ago, she, when she came to us, she needed an ultrasound.

That’s normal at Radiance Women’s Center, a pro-life center Green directs outside of Austin, Texas. But the purpose of this one was different. This woman needed an ultrasound to know how many abortion pills to take.

GREEN: She had already ordered the pill and she had been awaiting for it to arrive.

Most abortions are illegal in Texas, although Texas explicitly exempts the women who seek abortions from punishment. Mailing abortion drugs is also illegal, but online pill providers are still sending pills into Texas.

Green said the young woman showed her the email she had received from Aid Access, the European group that was sending her the drugs. It laid out instructions for taking the abortion pills at home.

GREEN: So that's concerning, because there's no oversight on how many pills they're taking and when they're taking them if they're taking them the way they're directed.

Aid Access boldly announced in July that it had sent abortion pills to more than thirty-five hundred people in pro-life states in less than a month. In Green’s mind, Texas just doesn’t have the systems in place to enforce its own laws against this kind of activity. She says that’s why she didn’t tell local authorities that Aid Access was mailing abortion pills to this woman.

GREEN: There has to be some policy to actually bring and hold accountable the individuals or businesses that are shipping these products in. And right now there is no accountability for it.

At the end of August, Green texted me saying another woman just came in for an ultrasound who had already ordered the pills and received them in the mail.

Other pro-life organizations in East Texas and Mississippi have told me similar stories.

ANGELA HILL: The practicality of stopping it is pretty tough.

That’s Mississippi State Senator Angela Hill. Like Texas, Mississippi has a law that specifically prohibits mailing abortion pills. Hill authored it, and it passed in 2013. She says that even before Mississippi shut down abortion businesses in the state, the law seemed to stop in-state abortionists from mailing the drugs. But it doesn’t deter abortionists in other states from sending abortion pills into Mississippi. She says that’s because of how hard the law is to enforce.

HILL: It's hard for us as a state law enforcement agency to track what's in the mail.

Hill said the federal government is in a better position to do that. But any support from the Biden administration is unlikely, given its pro-abortion position. And other states are increasingly unwilling to cooperate.

Since 2022, states like New York and Massachusetts have been passing laws shielding abortionists in their states from facing prosecution for breaking another state’s law against mailing abortion pills.

So what’s the solution?

JAMESON TAYLOR: We have to start thinking more creatively about what we can do to stop chemical abortion.

Jameson Taylor is one of the Mississippi lobbyists behind the law that eventually led to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Taylor says he’s been surprised by the pro-life movement’s lack of ideas for addressing the chemical abortion problem. Meanwhile, pro-abortion groups are getting very creative.

TAYLOR: The blue states are the one pushing back against red states like Mississippi, like Indiana, and they're saying, you know, we don't really care that you have made abortion illegal in your state. We're going to create a safe harbor for our doctors to mail chemical abortion pills across state lines into your state. We're going to encourage doctors to illegally offer telemedicine appointments to women in your state. And they know that this is illegal.

Taylor said pro-life states need that kind of energy, but in defense of law and order. And he has ideas for how to respond. One is to take a page out of the pro-abortion playbook.

TAYLOR: Do what the left does, which is to sue everybody. The Comstock Act basically says that you can't send anything related to abortion through the U.S. Mail. Okay, so sue the federal government, sue the post office, because they're aiding and abetting this violation of federal law. Sue those states that are encouraging doctors in their state to break both federal and state law. Sue, sue groups in other countries like Aid Access. Sue the Netherlands, because they're allowing this group to operate.

Taylor also suggested compelling Internet providers to block abortion pill websites. Another idea is to force pro-abortion states to cover medical costs for abortion pill complications in pro-life states.

The idea is to at least try something to protect women and babies from these unsupervised abortions.

TAYLOR: So the question is, are we going to take our pro-life protection seriously? And if we don't, it's going to just show that we don't have the same passion and energy that the radical pro-abortion side. It's not a question of policy or legality. It comes down to what do we really believe? And what are we willing to sacrifice for?

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leah Savas.

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