New Orleans Not only is the old saw true that it is “impossible to legislate morality,” it may be even harder to order it by judicial dictate. It’s early days, but we may be already seeing the resistance to this new Prohibition, almost a century after the last try when it came to the sins of drink. Couple the majority support for the right to choose and recent polls indicating the dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court’s ruling with globalism and firmly established precedential rights to receive mail and to freely travel, and many women, perhaps most women who are able, may already be making the Court’s decision a dead letter.
The Wall Street Journal filed a piece that claimed a split between domestic and foreign organizations that provide abortion pills, but to me it looks more like unspoken coordination by organizations sharing a mission, but implementing different strategies and tactics. US outfits doing telehealth like Hey Jane, Just the Pill, and Cholx are ramping up in states where abortion is firmly legal and where they can operate at will, and are encouraging women contacting them from states barring the pills to travel to legal zones. Web traffic to Hey Jane has multiplied by ten times and payments for pills have doubled. In some cases, groups are raising money to pay for the travel.
On the other hand, foreign-based nonprofits, like one quoted in the article, Red Necesito Abortar or the Necessary Abortion Network, said that they had “received more than 400 requests for abortion pills from women in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, among other states.” They are just one of many:
“Some 20 abortion-rights groups in Mexico send abortion mediations to US addresses at no cost, said Maria Antonieta Alcalde, director for Mexico and Latin America at Ipas, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s sexual rights.”
Mexico is not the only supplier. Aid Access, an Austria-based nonprofit, also mails pills. “Pill requests to Aid Access from people in Texas nearly tripled to 30 a day over the following three months after the state in September banned most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy….”
As conservatives should know, where there’s demand, there will be a supply. The federal government and the Justice Department seem clear that they are not going to allow states to restrict travel or the US mail service. There will still be lower income women with less access to help, but many women will be voting with their fetus to oppose this new prohibition, and, for all the sound and fury, it’s hard to believe that anything will stop them from protecting their rights to choose about their own bodies and to self-determine their own futures no matter what the Court or some state legislators might want or wish.