Inside the Secretive Network of Abortion Pill Vigilantes Decca Muldowney - Daily Beast
go to original May 23, 2023

Verónica Cruz Sánchez, the founder and of Las Libres, has hundreds of volunteers taking abortion pills across the border from Mexico to the U.S. (Las Libres)

Since the fall of Roe, a covert chain of activists have banded together to provide abortion medication to those in red states - and they’re risking everything in the process.

Smuggling medication from Mexico

The underground network begins with activists like Verónica Cruz Sánchez, the founder and executive director of Las Libres, a feminist organization founded in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2000. For two decades, Cruz and her colleagues have worked to distribute the abortion medication misoprostol across Mexico.

“Abortion has always existed, it will always exist. It will not cease to exist. Even if countries restrict it, even if territories restrict it, that does not mean that it stops abortion—it only puts people’s lives and health at risk,” Cruz says of the philosophy of Las Libres, which provides the medication for free.

When the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, radically restricting access to abortion in the state, Cruz turned her eyes north to the United States. Mexico’s Supreme Court had just ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish abortion as a crime, a hugely progressive step in a once staunchly conservative country. While Mexico appeared to be taking a step forward, Cruz says, she could see the United States moving in the opposite direction.

“We decided to form a cross-border network,” Cruz told The Daily Beast. Abortion pills are available over the counter in Mexico. Cruz organized hundreds of volunteers to take abortion pills over the border, initially to Texas, and then, when Roe fell, to other hostile states. Some are older expat American women who have made their homes in Mexico, and are sometimes nicknamed “the Old Hippies.”

Cruz is careful to protect the identities of the activists involved in smuggling pills over the border or how they do it. The people who take the pills over the border don’t know exactly where they come from, or who they are going to, Cruz says, which keeps each node in the network more secure.

“Nobody knows, in general terms, the woman who is having an abortion. She doesn’t know all the people involved so she has a safe abortion. And people who are helping her do not know who is the person who is having the abortion. That is our safety process,” Cruz says.

Las Libres is committed to getting abortion medication to the most vulnerable populations in the United States, including undocumented arrivals, poor people, and immigrants, despite any restrictive laws. Cruz sees abortion as a human right that cannot be taken away by legislators.

“We are not supporting and promoting a crime—we are assisting a right that the state is not capable of guaranteeing at this moment in the restricted territories,” Cruz says.

Nonetheless, anti-abortion groups in the United States have their sights set on further restricting abortion medication.

Read the rest at Daily Beast

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