Try as South Dakota and other theocracies might, they just can’t stop women from exercising their reproductive rights. The number of abortions in the United States has increased in the four years since the Supreme Court erased women’s right to control their bodies and what happens inside them.
Women in many states still struggle to exercise that right and suffer and die from post-Dobbs restrictions, but telemedicine and mifepristone and misoprostol have given women a lifeline that Dobbs can’t cut:
By December 2025, 29% of abortions were through telehealth.
…[B]ecause the mailing of abortion pills has become so widespread in the post-Dobbs era, abortion opponents may simply be unable to stop it.
…”We like to say the genie is out of the bottle,” said Elisa Wells, who co-founded and is the access director at Plan C, which provides information about accessing abortion pills online.
“Now that people know that they can get safe, fast, effective, affordable care through the mail, there’s no going back,” Wells said.
If mifepristone is restricted, many telehealth groups will immediately switch to using only misoprostol instead, they say.
Misoprostol is approved by the FDA to treat ulcers, and is also widely used off-label to manage miscarriages, induce labor and end pregnancies.
And while states could individually ban misoprostol, the FDA doesn’t typically regulate how a drug is used off-label, according to David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and national expert on abortion law.
“There would have to be some finding that it is not safe or effective for ulcer treatment, something that there’s no argument anyone could possibly show,” Cohen said.
…Other organizations are already directing patients to mifepristone from outside the U.S., through groups such as Aid Access and online pharmacies in places like India.
Even if the Trump administration tried to enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans the mailing of obscene matter and anything intended to produce an abortion, it would be extremely difficult to stop the flow of pills, Cohen said.
“We’ve had the ‘War on Drugs’ for what, half a century, maybe longer?” he said. “And everyone, if they wanted, could find illegal drugs within minutes, and have it probably delivered to their doorstep within hours” [Kate Wells, “Despite State Bans, Abortions Have Almost Doubled. The Reason? Pills via Telehealth,” NPR.org, 2026.06.22].
Heavy-handed government regulation fails to stop the exercise of basic human rights—gee, you’d think true conservatives would be happy to hear that.