After Dobbs: Abortion Industry Doubles Down on Abortion Pills

CV NEWS FEED // The Washington Post on Thursday published an article reporting that the abortion industry has gone all-in on abortion drugs in order to circumvent pro-life laws while Republicans are resting early on their laurels after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

“One year after the fall of Roe, the full impact of the landmark ruling remains unknown and in flux,” the left-leaning newspaper reported.

The Post quoted Dr. John Seago, the President of Texas Right to Life. Seago said the “new threat” is the abortion industry’s post-Dobbs pivot from surgical to chemical abortions. “The new abortion clinic is as close as your pocket and your cellphone, where you can go to these websites,” he said.

The article noted that to combat this, Seago advocates for a few legal solutions pro-life states like Texas can accomplish, including “block[ing] abortion pill websites, expand[ing] civil liability, [and] empower[ing] the state attorney general to prosecute anyone who breaks the law.”

However, the authors pointed out that the Republican-dominated Texas legislature

showed little interest in embracing those ideas. One by one, each of the antiabortion bills prioritized by Texas Right to Life died before they got a hearing, signaling that, at least for now, Republicans representing the state at the forefront of the antiabortion movement felt that they had done enough.

That sentiment appeared to grow across several Republican-led legislatures, where a driving desire to ban all or most abortions gave way to fear of political backlash in the wake of multiple victories by pro-abortion rights candidates and ballot initiative campaigns during the 2022 midterm elections.

While pro-abortion Democrats are playing offense by turning to abortion-by-pill, many Republican lawmakers across the country are refusing to engage by failing to pass the legislation advocated for by pro-life groups such as Texas Right to Life. 

“I heard from elected officials that women were not considering abortion in Texas anymore,” Seago said. “That is a delusion. It’s completely disconnected from reality.”

As Republican politicians are punting on further pro-life protections, the abortion industry is taking full advantage. 

The Post discussed the story of Alan Braid, a nearly 80-year-old abortionist whose facility in Texas was shut down after the Dobbs decision allowed the state’s pro-life law to go into effect.

Braid, however, did not let this faze him and quickly opened up two more abortion facilities in New Mexico and Illinois, blue states that both border multiple pro-life states and are unlikely to regulate abortion in the foreseeable future. 

The Post reported that Braid’s New Mexico facility “quickly had a full schedule — with over 90 percent of patients coming from out of state, almost all from Texas.” This, as he said, included some women who were driving up to 12 hours just to obtain abortions.

The article said that Braid’s story

reflects an evolving post-Roe landscape of abortion access, with 55 clinics across the South and Midwest forced to stop providing abortions and 16 new abortion clinics opening in states where abortion is legal, according to a database maintained by Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who studies abortion.

A recent FiveThirtyEight study found that in the nine months following Dobbs, there were 69,285 more legal abortions in pro-abortion states, and this increase was largely a result of women traveling from pro-life states such as Texas. 

This was still less than the “93,575 fewer legal abortions in states that banned or severely restricted abortion for at least one week in the nine-month period after Dobbs.”

However, new blue-state facilities are only a small part of the abortion industry’s offensive. Aid Access is a chemical abortion lobby group based in Austria and founded and run by Rebecca Gomperts of the Netherlands. The Post article’s authors described the group as “a Europe-based organization that mails abortion pills to all 50 states, including states where abortion is banned.” 

Aid Access “received almost 60 percent more requests for pills this spring than in the months immediately following Dobbs, fielding an average of 344 orders per day in the month of April,” the same month a federal judge stayed the FDA’s approval of a key abortion-inducing drug.

Gomperts said that following Dobbs, “people became more aware of the possibility of pills — they learned that they can do it themselves, and it’s easier, cheaper.”

CatholicVote Director of Governmental Affairs Tom McClusky said Aid Access may be liable pursuant to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a Nixon-era anti-organized crime statute that was initially enacted to combat the Mafia. 

“Aid Access brags about setting up shop in the U.S. for their pill-mailing operations in blue states with ‘shield laws,’” McClusky said. “This screams out for Federal RICO prosecution. If only we had a serious Department of Justice.”

The so-called “shield laws” McClusky referred to have passed in Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington, and New York. These laws allow doctors licensed to practice in these states to prescribe abortion pills to women residing in states where abortion is illegal. 

As abortions continue to abound, albeit at reduced rates, Students for Life America President Kristan Hawkins highlighted the need for pro-life Americans to remain in the fight and not take Dobbs or state-level bans for granted.

I think we’re farther than anyone would have expected we would be,” she said. “But am I complacent with that? Hell no.”