Anti-Abortion Groups: Abortion is Still Legal in All 50 States
Some pro-life organizations have touted many states as “abortion-free,” but the law and statistics on mail-order abortion pills prove them wrong.
Note: This piece was supposed to be published months ago. But, you know. Reasons.
Last November, LifeNews.com touted Louisiana as being “abortion-free.” “Stop Abortion Now,” a project of LifeNews.com, said the same about Oklahoma, while Students for Life Action had previously claimed fifteen states “are now abortion free.”
Groups like Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA), Abolish Human Abortion, and Abolitionists Rising are raising the alarm that these states are still allowing thousands of legal abortions every year. The fight to end legal abortion in even the most pro-life states is far from over—and it’s pro-life laws themselves that are keeping abortion legal throughout the country.
While abortion clinics in fourteen states have closed, self-managed abortions are still happening in states like Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Dakota and others touted as having “banned abortion.” Abortion pills containing mifepristone and misoprostol are regularly shipped into these states and used by parents to destroy their preborn sons and daughters. Relying on data from July and August of 2022, FAA estimates the total annual number of abortions committed in these states to be more than 50,000.
Leading pro-life organizations have become cognizant of this fact. President of Susan B. Anthony List Marjorie Dannenfelser has called mail-order pills “a workaround to abortion regulations,” and said that those who mail abortion pills should be “jailed for trafficking.” Texas Right to Life also claims that thousands of abortion pills are being mailed to Texas residents. These and other mainstream anti-abortion organizations oppose criminal penalties for self-managed abortions.
An estimated one in five abortive women have travelled to nearby abortion-friendly states to obtain their abortions since since Dobbs v. Jackson, which reversed Roe v. Wade, while demand for mail-order abortion pills has rocketed. It’s not obvious what percentage of these shipments have already resulted in abortions and what percentage are due to individuals “stockpiling” in an uncertain legal landscape. However, expert opinion cited by the New York Times, relied on by FAA to estimate the number of abortions, put it around 60% of initial requests to leading mail-order abortion site Aid Access for abortion pills.
According to a July 14th press release from Aid Access, abortion “treatments” were shipped from states with “shield laws” to more than 3,500 people in states where abortion is “banned.” In this mini-documentary, abortion abolitionists, who seek the immediate criminalization of abortion and equal protection for the preborn and see incremental pro-life regulations as compromise with evil, ordered abortion pills from within Oklahoma, a state where abortion is supposedly “illegal.” It took four or five clicks, a few hundred dollars and five days for the pack to arrive safely in their mailbox.
Pro-life advocates have recently launched legal and legislative attacks on mail-order abortion pills, which account for 54% of all abortions since 2020, based on survey data. The Supreme Court will hear one case challenging the legality of mail-order pills in the coming months, but it’s unclear whether any of the pro-life legal challenges will significantly curtail accessibility.
The free-flowing supply of abortion drugs is not the chief problem with the current self-managed abortion regime.
The harsh truth is that the free-flowing supply of abortion drugs, while abhorrent, is not the chief problem with the current self-managed abortion regime in pro-life states. As Abolitionists Rising’s Russell T. Hunter says in the aforementioned mini-doc, “Pills do not take themselves.”
This is reality has amplified one of the major philosophical clashes between abolitionists and traditional pro-lifers like those who work for SBA List or Oklahoma Right to Life. Conventional pro-life wisdom holds that women shouldn’t be held legally culpable for abortions of any kind, and that to suggest they should be is not just politically unfeasible, but endangers Republican majorities and the pro-life movement as a whole. Abolitionists counter by saying it is feasible--some deep red states have already come close to having the anti-abortion votes to grant preborn babies equal protection under the law, such as in Oklahoma and Louisiana. The people who stopped those bills weren’t pro-choicers. They were pro-life organizations and influential pro-life politicos who applied pressure to legislators to back down.
Anti-abortion activists must engage with the reality that pills don’t take themselves.
Debates on feasibility and protecting the pro-life movement’s reputation aside, anti-abortion activists must engage with the reality that pills don’t take themselves. Most often, the mothers themselves take them voluntarily. Yet with every law that supposedly “bans” abortion, pro-life architects have intentionally made self-managed abortions fully legal. It is legal for a pregnant mother to take abortion pills to end the life of her preborn son or daughter. South Dakota’s law reads, “A female who undergoes an unlawful abortion, as set forth in § 22-17-5.1, may not be held criminally liable for the abortion.” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond explicitly stated that “Oklahoma law does not allow pregnant women to be punished for seeking, performing or self-inducing an abortion to intentionally terminate their pregnancy.”
The same is true in the other “abortion-free” states, such as Kentucky, Texas, and Arkansas, where a bill to enable prosecution of those responsible for commissioning or self-managing abortions failed last year. Rose Mimms of Arkansas Right to Life, which opposed the bill, said, “We’re not about punishing women. We love women. We can pass laws to protect babies without punishing the mothers.”
Without a trained abortionist to lay all the blame on, where can justice be found in a pro-life state riddled with legal self-managed abortions? Pro-lifers turn their ire toward mail-order abortion sites, which allow purchase of abortifacients with a few clicks while assuring buyers they are safe. We should indeed make every effort to ban abortion pills, yet without establishing justice for those who use the pills, the approach is akin to curtailing the distribution of weapons typically used in homicide (of born humans) while leaving the act of murder itself completely legal. Just as “guns don’t kill people, people do,” “abortion pills don’t kill babies, people do.”
Practically speaking, making the act of procuring and performing abortions, even on oneself, criminal, will aid a chief goal of pro-lifers: to make abortion “unthinkable.” What would make abortion more unthinkable than enshrining equal protection for the preborn into law, such that abortive parents would have to consider that what they plan to do is defined by law as homicide, and that they are liable for prosecution? The law teaches those who are subject to it. Exempting the causal agents of abortion teaches the public that it is not murder. If a woman takes abortion pills, gained illicitly or not, state laws currently say it’s no big deal—less concerning than speeding on the highway.
What would make abortion more unthinkable than enshrining equal protection for the preborn into law?
Immunity for abortive parents denies the preborn equal protection of the laws. Rectifying this would do is exactly what pro-lifers have said is crucial to building a culture that values human life: declare the truth that preborn human lives life have the right to not be murdered—not just nominally, as is the case today in so-called “abortion-free” states, but backed by the force of the criminal justice system.
Pro-life organizations have promoted for decades the belief that women are merely the second victim in abortion, and the abortionist is the only one that can be held to account. Unpopular as it is to say, self-managed abortions shatter this myth, as mothers become both the commissioner and perpetrator of the crime. This claim that mothers lack culpability persists among mainstream pro-lifers, but the more “radical” abortion abolitionists are eager to have the debate now more than ever, in an age of completely legal self-managed abortions within states that were supposed to be “abortion-free.”
Yes, the distribution of abortion pills should be made illegal, but those intent on acquiring illicit drugs will still find ways to get them. For the act of abortion to truly be illegal in any state, the legal grounds and the will to prosecute the abortionist for homicide, even when it is the mother herself, must be established. Nothing else will do.