On Tuesday, the U.S. state of Oklahoma passed a new bill that makes abortion a felony, and pregnancies due to rape and incest are no exception, making it more difficult for American women to seek abortion.
In order to have abortions, American women began to seek "abortion immigrants", patronizing black clinics, shopping for abortion pills online, and making homemade abortion tools....
This year is just over 50 years since abortion was widely recognized as legal in the United States, but it all feels like it's back in time to the 1960s...
Last year, Texas implemented the most stringent abortion ban, the Heartbeat Act, which geographically close to Oklahoma, Texas, also included abortion as a felony. Women who are found to be seeking abortions, doctors who perform surgeries, and even drivers who take patients to hospitals are convicted.
It could easily be sentenced to 10 years in prison and a hefty fine of $100,000. Women among the 7.7 million residents of Texas and Oklahoma who want to seek abortion are almost to the point where there is nowhere to go.
Currently, there are very few states in the United States that do not have any restrictions on abortion, so women living in states with abortion bans have to go to these states for surgery. After plastic surgery tourism and hair transplant tourism, the United States has spawned its unique "abortion tourism" industry chain, which is not something to be proud of.
University of Texas researchers said a total of 5,574 women traveled from Texas to seven nearby states for surgery between September and December last year in an attempt to escape allegations of illegal abortion. Nearly a third of abortion facilities in the U.S. are based in New York and California, resulting in women who want to have an abortion having to travel 300-500 miles to complete a not-so-difficult procedure.
But fleeing to other states to become abortion refugees does not solve the problem. The long distance means that not every woman can afford to pay for expensive airline tickets and fly out of town for surgery, often from relatively carefree families, who are already the luckiest of the unfortunate.
Even more difficult are women from poor families, some of whom have to work three jobs to support their families, not to mention the lack of money, not even a few days off to go out of town.
Poor housewives, the whole family only has a husband to work, the family already has a lot of children, if they go to other cities for a few days, the children will not be taken care of, nor can they afford to hire a nanny. Having another child makes the family poorer, but travel abortion is impossible for them.
Even more humiliating is that politicians are trying to further strengthen the current anti-abortion bill and begin "interstate enforcement." If the bill is strengthened, women in anti-abortion states will be prosecuted and jailed even if they run to other states for surgery.
Missouri is already operating these elements in an attempt to impose penalties on "anyone who provides abortion services to Missouri residents."
Just because they didn't want to give birth to a child, but they were wanted to be hunted like fugitives, women with nowhere to escape chose another new path - buying abortion pills online.
Before 2020, medications such as mifepristone, which are needed for miscarriage, must first be seen in the hospital. Due to the impact of the epidemic on travel, the U.S. government and the medical community reached a consensus and finally permanently liberalized the distribution of mifepristone.
Women who need to terminate their pregnancy within 10 weeks can consult the relevant medical institutions online or by phone, get a prescription and order the drug, and then take it according to the instructions. Demand for this self-service drug abortion was mediocre, but after the anti-abortion law came into force, orders for texas abortion drugs increased by 1100%, and now it has become the most important means of abortion in the United States.
Volunteers from out of state who help distribute medicines in Texas
But for anti-abortion states, there is also a risk of arrest for sneaking a medical abortion. Texas, Arizona and Louisiana have banned online abortion face-to-face services in an attempt to prevent patients from having abortions by making them unavailable.
This forced local women to ask for "purchasing" drugs through social accounts. At a time when the demand for drugs is getting bigger and bigger, it is easy to breed harmful business of selling fake drugs.
Many others secretly visit abortion clinics by using virtual IP addresses in other states. In order not to be caught, the delivery address is set in the courier cabinet in other states, and he drives to get it. Abortion is an incomparably legitimate female right, which has become a spy war.
The anti-abortion government has come up with policies aimed at buying abortion pills online. At present, there are 8 states in the United States of Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia, and 8 states have enacted legislation to force doctors to prescribe abortion drugs to patients while "Amway" abortion drug reversal treatment.
Can abortion be reversed? This is a strange thing.
Anti-abortion groups claim that this treatment can be used to "counteract the effects of abortion pills and allow women to continue their pregnancies"... However, this "treatment method" advocated by the state government has not been approved by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Experts explain that this treatment method is actually to let women who have abortions take or inject large amounts of progesterone to counteract the effects of abortion drugs.
The Faculty of Obstetricians and Gynecologists believes that the operability of this treatment lacks scientific basis, lacks monitoring data, and improper use of progesterone may also cause cardiovascular, neurological and endocrine problems in women.
What is more worrying is whether women will secretly let women take this "reverse abortion" drug when they want to have an abortion and her family does not allow it? Will women be forced to take this drug?
Believing that these problems are not something that the state government that advocates reversal therapy did not think of, but only to achieve its own political goals, no one cares about the lives of the victims. This series of confusing operations makes people lament that women throughout the United States have only been fighting for abortion rights for about fifty years, and now they are repeating the tragedy of history.
In the 1950s-1960s, up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed in the United States each year. Chelian, who has been helping poor women with abortions for years, recalls that she became pregnant unexpectedly at the age of 15 and that her parents had to take her to a black clinic through the black market because abortion was not legal at the time.
To prevent getting caught, contact the clinic with a public telephone and a code. The clinic was in a dirty warehouse, packed with women of all ages. How to describe the danger level of such a small workshop? The doctor who operated on Chelian, his sister died on the operating table of an illegal abortion.
Although the United States liberalized abortion policy in 1970, there were frequent cases of abortion doctors being shot and killed by radicals in conservative areas. Dr. Eln, who was practicing medicine at the time, said: "In the anti-abortion neighborhood at that time, doctors wanted to go to surgery without wearing body armor, and the chances of not being killed were very small."
The two sides that support the opposition to abortion stand-off
In 2022, a large number of people of color, low-income families and adolescent women have been most affected by the anti-abortion trend, and they have once again achieved the purpose of abortion through illegal black clinics, three fake drugs, and even "DIY".
Dr. Herne, who runs abortion clinics in conservative areas, said many of the women who came to perform the surgery were very pitiful, some pregnant with malformed fetuses, some victims of sexual assault, and some drug users and AIDS patients. Other women are abused by their partners, who want to control them through their children, and in order to get out, they are eager to beat up the children and completely distance themselves from each other.
Whatever the reason, to have or not to have children is their choice and right, but now they need to go to the black clinic and risk their lives for surgery, as they did fifty years ago.
Even some people have begun to teach how to use the ancient method of the 70s of the last century to "self-help manual abortion". For example, the famous Del Em vacuum suction method, which was a great invention at the time, allowed women to have abortions at home.
But its operation is not so simple, and the chance of accidents is not low. In the movie "Revolutionary Road", the heroine played by Kate Winslet died because of this abortion method. For people in 2022, having to choose this retro way of abortion is indeed a confusing thing.
Some people even learned the hanger abortion method that women had to use 100 years ago to terminate pregnancy, which is more violent and more terrifying, and countless women have died of abortion with hangers, and in today's technologically advanced world, such a historical resurgence is lamentable.
To prevent these from happening, medical organizations in some other states surreptitiously travel to anti-abortion states from time to time to provide treatment for women. They replaced all their cars with bulletproof ones, as they did in the 1970s, lest the extreme right attack them.
Clinics in California and New York are now so packed with abortion patients in Texas that plans for patients in the state to terminate their pregnancies have been delayed, and people are exhausted and walking on thin ice for abortion, as if the rights they have won over a hundred years have become a bubble overnight.
Where the future holds, no one knows...