One simple strategy that could undermine Team Trump’s newest anti-abortion agenda

If you are someone who can get pregnant, I am begging you now: Obtain abortion pills. Get them because you may need them. Also get them because someone else you know might need them, too.

The forced-birth movement has, quite cannily, made banning mifepristone one of its highest priorities. If a “national abortion ban” sounds scary to you, well, social conservatives have been scared off of it as well. Reproductive choice has triumphed at the ballot box since Dobbs and national Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric. Their recognition that banning abortion is extremely unpopular is where the assault on mifepristone comes in.

National Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric.

Over 50% of all abortions are pill-induced “medical abortions,” as opposed to “procedural abortions.” If crusaders against reproductive care can use the regulatory state — pause to inhale the stinging scent of hypocrisy wafting over from those “small-government” folks — to ban or even just further complicate access to medical abortion on a national level, it could hand the forced-birth movement an even bigger victory than Dobbs.

As The Washington Post reported last week, anti-abortion advocates are already planning for a Trump White House sympathetic to their anti-medical abortion agenda. Former President Donald Trump may not be eager to pass a national ban — he is attuned to popularity contests, after all. But Trump could be persuaded to allow his Department of Justice and Health and Human Services leaders to crack down on abortion pills via mechanisms at their disposal. The Food and Drug Administration, remember, has the power to take drugs off the market.

That this conservative Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about mifepristone availability this year means that restrictions are likely coming. We can only guess at how close to a total ban the decision will be — and whether President Joe Biden’s FDA will enforce it. The big gamble of the anti-mifepristone regulatory strategy is that a pro-abortion executive branch could slow-walk or refuse to enforce the amended regulations. However, I, personally, am not interested in continuing to bet my reproductive freedom on the outcome of presidential elections.

Perhaps you have already gotten your abortion pills. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association based on the records of overseas telehealth service Aid Access showed almost 50,000 “advance provision” requests from women in the United States between September 2021 and April 2023. (An advance provision request is a request from someone who is not yet pregnant.)

Where abortion is legal, some doctors will prescribe the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, colloquially known as “abortion pills,” to those who want to use them at some later date. Aid Access, the most prominent and well-regarded source, will prescribe them via telehealth no matter where you live. No state has made it illegal to possess abortion pills; “self-managed abortions” are difficult to legislate against, as the anti-abortion movement has emphasized penalizing caregivers and not the people wanting to end their pregnancies.

We can no longer trust that our formal health care system will be able to provide women with a safe way to end their pregnancies.

But I’m encouraging you — everyone who can get pregnant — to obtain abortion pills not just because you or I should have options as an individual. The second reason I want you to get them is because you might be the person to have them when someone else doesn’t. I think we should consider abortion pills part of a well-stocked home first aid kit. We can no longer trust that our formal health care system will be able to provide women with a safe way to end their pregnancies, so we need to be ready and able to help each other.

Reconceptualizing medical abortion access as something friends do for each other is a victory in itself. It would rob the forced-birth movement of one of its most potent if misleading arguments: that abortions are inherently scary, surgical and involve a tiny fetus. Medical abortions are a chemical process to deal with a health issue. To be sure, they can be uncomfortable. The decision to go forward with one can be emotional and inherently intimate. But in that way, medical abortions are no different than the act that starts a pregnancy — except no one else is involved.

I want abortion pills to be so common that women can ask each other about them with a level of embarrassment and risk akin to asking strangers for a tampon. I want them to be so common that we don’t talk about selling them to each other — no more than you’d sell a tampon to another woman in need. I want them to be so common that we stop thinking about abortions as a thing where clinics are inevitably part of the process.

I recognize we might have to sneak around a bit. Even in the deepest blue areas, not everyone feels comfortable talking about the ins and outs of reproductive care. In places like my home state of Texas, we might have to resort to strategies more like chalk codes than the friendly callout for a maxi pad in a music festival bathroom line.

Secret signs, or a certain kind of flower growing in your yard, a code word or a sticker on your car; this is the friendly underground we shouldn’t have to inculcate. But we will need this kind of mutual aid whisper network if access to mifepristone shrinks. A lot of us need it right now.

Ana Marie Cox

Ana Marie Cox is a political journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast and The Washington Post, among other places.

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