Inside the Online Market for Overseas Abortion Pills

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/13/us/abortion-pill-order-online-mifepristone.html
https://archive.ph/jLXWn

Inside the Online Market for Overseas Abortion Pills
For-profit sellers have arisen to meet the demand for unregulated abortion pills — one that will only grow if legal access in the United States is further restricted.
By Allison McCann
April 13, 2023



A few times each month, a 10” x 15” padded FedEx envelope arrives in Mark’s mailbox in eastern Florida. He doesn’t know when the packages will arrive, only that each shipment usually contains about a dozen individual mifepristone pills and several 10-packs of misoprostol, the two drugs used in a medication abortion.

He repackages the pills — one mifepristone and four misoprostol each — and then prints a one-page sheet of instructions before shipping the medication to U.S. customers who have placed orders from medside24.com, a website based in Kazakhstan that sells abortion pills exclusively.

Mark is one link in a supply chain for abortion pills sold outside of the formal U.S. health care system — a market that has expanded significantly in the last year and that includes both overseas manufacturers and ad hoc distribution networks in the United States.

“I’m not the dealer, I’m just forwarding the mail for someone,” Mark told me in February. (Because distributing medication from overseas is illegal, many people interviewed for this story asked to be identified by first name or first initial only.) “I’m not for abortion but I’m not entirely against it,” he added. “On some level, it’s none of my business.”

Websites selling pills offer a convenient — though legally dubious — route for people looking for a way around state-level abortion bans. In the nine months since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, tens of thousands of patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy have gone online in search of pills. Often, it is the only option for those unable to travel for clinic-based care.

...

[lark]

1. I hope these are the real pills.

I'd be afraid of trying this, but then if I were young, pregnant and desperate, who knows what I'd do, especially with my medical condition.

[localroger]

3. There isn't really a compelling reason to counterfeit them

Nowadays it costs $800-$1K per kilogram to have most random drugs synthesized in a robotic lab. Quality control tends to be good because once the process is initiated, no humans are involved. It's just not that much more expensive to produce the real drug than it is to produce fake pills, and the risks are very minimal to those of producing scheduled drugs. It's almost impossible to stop them from entering the country via the mail because the quantities are modest, and it's completely impossible to stop them from being forwarded within the country because of the laws about mail tampering.

[David__77]

2. It's important to grow knowledge of these resources.

…

[Wounded Bear]

4. It's a pity that some people need to go this route...

bunch of Christofascists ruining America.

[Duppers]

5. Indeed! 👍

[PlanetBev]

6. This country never learns

My grandmother had an abortion somewhere around 1919. She said there wasn’t a woman on that block in Chicago that didn’t know where to go to get an abortion.

I give money to the Brigid Alliance, ACLU, Planned Parenthood and NARAL. Bring it on, Fascist assholes. We’ll fight you at every turn.