Is your state proudly pro-life? Did your legislature have a trigger law poised to crack down on abortion as soon as the Supreme Court changed the landscape? Were your clinics forced to close after Roe fell? Did you send all those pro-choice OBGYNs packing after Dobbs came down?
You should indeed praise God if your state is pro-life. But do not buy the lie that your state is now a sanctuary for the unborn. It is not.
Babies are not safe even in the states that have banned abortion.
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently released a study that vividly illustrates this. JAMA’s study examined 15 months of data from Aid Access, a telemedicine service that provides abortion pills to women in all 50 states. (The Connecticut Hospital Association has published a summary of this study, accessible here.)
The results are both shocking and, sadly, completely expected. Of course, the abortion lobby wasn’t going to give up when Roe fell. We live in the age of mass commerce and the internet, after all.
And thus, between July 2023 and August 2024, Aid Access shipped almost 120,000 abortion pill packs to residents in the U.S. Let that sink in—in a little more than a year, one telemedicine service provided enough of one method of abortion to enable the deaths of 40 times the number of people who died in 9/11.
And that’s really only a fraction of American abortions—the official abortion count for 2024 was 1.14 million.
But that’s not all. The abortion lobby is tenacious—if they can’t physically perform abortions in your state, they’ll just mail abortions into your state. A full 84% of Aid Access’s abortion pill prescriptions went to states with either near-total abortion bans or bans on telemedicine abortion.
More than four out of five of Aid Access’s prescriptions went to states with abortion bans! So if you think your state is a sanctuary for the unborn, I hate to break it to you: it isn’t.
Mothers can still get abortions mailed to their doorstep, even where it’s technically illegal.
You might ask, “How does that work?” How can organizations like Aid Access ship abortion pills to states with bans on telemedicine abortion? Well, they’re protected by “shield laws“—laws that protect abortion providers from prosecution even when they mail abortion pills to states that ban them.
Essentially, it’s a law protecting those who break the law. The Guardian reports that these shield laws have yet to be tested in the courts and that a dispute involving them may eventually reach the Supreme Court.
Dobbs didn’t remove abortion—there are actually more abortions happening now than just before the decision came down.
Dobbs just made abortion look different. It’s now an invisible, stealthy foe, creeping around the country from mailbox to mailbox.
Until we crack down on telemedicine abortion, abortion will never go away.
We still have much to do.
