Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] They will be keenly aware of the fact that if it's done in Louisiana, then other states are likely to adopt the same legislation if it's allowed. And if they do that, all of a sudden, that breaks their hegemony once again and their ability to smuggle abortions, and not just any old abortions, but abortions that present greater risk and abortions using a methodology that allow people to carry out coerced abortions, that stranglehold across the entirety of the country will be broken.
[00:00:33] Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And in this episode we're going to be taking a deeper look at the on again, off again, or possibly that should be the off again, on again legal stash that has been playing out in the United States over the past few days regarding the dispensing of the abortion pill.
[00:00:54] We will start in a moment by taking a deep look at how we got here and where things are at right now as they stand. But in a nutshell, last Friday in America, which was Saturday New Zealand time, a Louisiana court ruled that if you wanted to access the abortion pill in the estate, you could no longer do that via mail order. You had to go to an in person practitioner to acquire the abortion pill. Pretty quickly that was subjected to a legal challenge. So, as I said, in a moment we will take a deep dive into, into how we got here and where things are at right now. Then from there I want to explore what I think are the very good reasons for why even if you are someone who identifies as being pro abortion choice on the issue of abortion, you should actually be in favour of the original ruling by the Louisiana court on this issue. And then finally, I want to conclude by taking a look at the deeper ideological realities that are at play here. And for what it's worth giving a little prediction of my own about where I think this could end up going. Now I say for what it's worth, because the reality is that none of us can accurately predict the future and it's really uncertain about where this will all land. So let's start by taking a deeper look at where things currently stand and how we got here. And to do that, we're gonna read some coverage from Al Jazeera which provides a pretty good summary of things as they currently stand and how we arrived in this situation.
[00:02:21] The U.S. supreme Court has temporarily reinstated a rule allowing an abortion pill to be prescribed through telemedicine and dispensed through the mail lifting a judicial ban that narrowed access to the medication nationwide. So just to be clear, the subsequent legal challenge to the Louisiana court ruling last Friday means that there is a temporary stay of execution and the ruling from the Louisiana Court has been temporarily overturned and the old rule is currently in place, so you can currently access it via mail order. In Louisiana, Justice Samuel Alito issued an interim order on Monday, pausing for one week a decision by the New Orleans based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to reimpose an older federal rule requiring an in person clinician visit to receive mifeprostone. The fifth Circuit acted in a challenge to the rule by the Republican led state of Louisiana. The Supreme Court's action, called an administrative stay, gives the Justices more time to review Emergency requests by two manufacturers of MifeProstone and we'll talk about in a moment why they might be involved to ensure that the drug can be provided via telehealth. That's via mail order and the mail while the legal challenge plays out, Alito ordered Louisiana to respond to the drugmaker's requests by Thursday and indicated that the administrative stay would expire on May 11. The court would be expected to extend the interim stay or formally decide the requests by that time. Leto, one of the nine member court's six conservative justices, acted because he is designated by the Court to oversee emergency matters that arise in a group of states that includes Louisiana. The case puts the contentious issue of abortion back in front of the justices, who must confront another effort by abortion opponents to scale back access to mifeprostone. With the November US congressional elections looming, the court in 2024 unanimously rejected an initial bid by anti abortion groups and doctors to roll back Food and Drug Administration. That's the FDA regulations that had eased access to the drug, ruling that these plaintiffs lacked the necessary legal standing to pursue the challenge. So just so we're clear here, they didn't rule on the case based on its merits. They said you actually don't meet the administrative legal requirements, the procedural requirements to actually proceed with this case. So it couldn't go ahead. Mifeprostone, given FDA regulatory approval in 2000, is taken with another drug called misoprostol to perform medication abortions, also known as chemical abortions or early medical abortions, a method that now accounts for more than 60% of all abortions in the U.S. the ongoing battles over abortion rights follow the court's 2022 ruling that overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent that had legalised abortion nationwide. That ruling has prompted 13 states to enact near total bans on abortion, while several others have sharply restricted access.
[00:05:27] Louisiana sued the FDA last year claiming that a rule adopted during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, a rule that eased access to mifeprostone by eliminating the in person dispensing requirement, is illegal and undermines the state's abortion ban. So there's two things here to be aware of. Number one is the Biden administration said, alright, let's get rid of that old rule from the FDA that said you actually had to go to an in person practitioner you can now access this thing with via mail order. And they did that.
[00:05:59] It's highly unlikely that they were not aware of the fact that that would basically open up abortion via mail order across the entire region of the United States. So it was their way of actually circumventing states that had laws outlawing abortion or restricting abortion. And so what the Louisiana state is arguing is that, hey, this is illegal because it undermines our ability to actually get govern our own legal jurisdiction, which is this here state of Louisiana. And basically we've created a law and we've done it the right way and then we've got this federal rule from the FDA which is actually aiding the breaking of and undermining of the law as it currently exists because people can then mail order the products for an abortion into our state. And that is not upholding our ability to govern. Well, the pills manufacturer Danko Laboratories and GenBio Pro, which makes a generic version, is intervened in the litigation to defend the 2023 regulation. So no surprise there, the abortion pill manufacturers want the mail order option. The administration of current US President Donald Trump cited an ongoing review of safety regulations concerning mifeprostone and opposed the state's challenge. So in other words, Trump's administration is in opposition to what Louisiana is doing here. And they've said, hey, we've got a review, a safety review. This has been one of the frustration for pro lifers in regard to the current Trump administration is that they have been very slow in delivering on this particular issue here. And they're saying, we've got this safety review, it's coming. We don't support what Louisiana is doing.
[00:07:37] In April, U.S. judge David Joseph in Lafayette, Louisiana declined to block the regulation, but agreed with the administration to put the case on hold pending the review. So that's the Trump administration, the FDA review. The the 5th Circuit blocked the rule on May 1. The legal and political fight over access to mifeprostone has dominated the debate over abortion in the US over the past few years. The American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU called the top court's decision on Monday a positive short term development. The Supreme Court needs to put an end to this baseless attack on our reproductive freedom once and for all, julia Kaye, senior lawyer for the Reproductive Freedom Project of the aclu, said in a statement.
[00:08:21] Since the Supreme Court revoked the right to abortion in 2022. Now this is important to understand because this here is a misleading statement. There is no such thing as the right to abortion that exists in America or anywhere in fact. But this is the American context. It does not exist as a right. It is not a constitutional right, despite what some pro abortion advocates were claiming around the time. The way that you end up with Roe v. Wade is highly dubious. And that's why you have legal scholars who for decades have been saying and writing about the fact that the original Roe v. Wade ruling was highly suspect, it did not stand on solid judicial ground, and therefore it was only a matter of time before the whole house of cards would come crumbling down as it did in 2022. And the way they got there was not because there was a right to abortion that existed in the American Constitution, but what they did was they piggybacked off previous and so first of all, there's a case, a previous case well before Roe v. Wade that involves access to contraception. And the ruling is that there is a right to privacy and that entitles married couples to access contraception. Then there's a subsequent ruling which says that that ruling should apply to all people who want to use contraception. And basically in a nutshell, that right to privacy does not exist in the US Constitution.
[00:09:48] What they did in those cases was they said, and in fact go and read the original wording of the Justices because it's quite astounding when you read about how they describe it, they talk about this idea of penumbral emanations that are coming from the Constitution. And and so basically they're talking here about vagaries and how they can see reading between the lines and in the shadows, like a penumbra is a sunspot that can affect the moon, for example. So they're saying in these shadows they can see in the Constitution what they read as a right to privacy. And therefore then that that right to privacy should also be applied to the use of contraception. So even if you're okay with the first point, it's still questionable how they got to the second point that that would then also apply to accessing contraception. But then what happens with Roe v. Wade is Roe v. Wade. The justices in the Supreme Court, they piggyback on the back of those original cases and they say they that right to privacy would also apply to the issue of abortion. The whole thing was dubious and there never was a right to abortion, ever. In fact, one of the justices who voted in favour of the Roe v. Wade ruling back in 1973, in his writings and summing up on the matter, he was pretty clear about the fact that if you actually could establish the personhood of the unborn child, so foetal personhood was established, that then in actual fact, Roe v. Wade would completely collapse because the right to life, which is actually guaranteed in the US Constitution, would also apply to unborn persons. So that's how we arrived at the situation. There was no right to abortion. Since the Supreme Court revoked access to abortion in 2022, at a federal level, Democrats have been seizing on the unpopularity of bans on the procedure and emphasising the issue in their electoral platforms. Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, welcomed the court's decision on Monday, but said this fight is just beginning. We will stop at nothing to prevent the Republicans from putting a national abortion ban into effect, schumer wrote on X. And that, by the way, is not at all what's going on here either. This is just complete falsehood. What the Louisiana Court ruling stated was that you could access it still, so there was no ban in place, but you just couldn't do it via mail order. You had to go in person if you wanted to access the abortion pill. So this is not even remotely close to being some sort of national ban on abortion. On Monday, Republican Senator Josh Hawley cited disputed findings on the health risks associated with mifeprostone, urging lawmakers to act. Now it's time for Congress to ban it completely for use in abortion, he said in a social media post. So that's a pretty good summary of where things are at and how we got here. What I want to do now is I want to take a look at the very good reasons why, even if you're someone who identifies as people being pro abortion choice on the issue of abortion, I think you should actually be in favour of the original Louisiana court ruling. There are some pretty clear and obvious reasons that it seems to me why this, even if you're someone who is liberal and calls yourself pro choice, why this actually makes sense as a ruling. First and obvious is the safety concerns. This is a pill, this is a drug, this is a chemical. This that can have unintended consequences in the lives of people who take it. And some of those consequences can be quite serious. And it seems to me if you are truly committed to safety, then you really shouldn't be, as a general rule, dispensing drugs via mail order, particularly drugs that have serious risks associated with them. This is just not good and it's certainly not caring in the way that you practise medicine.
[00:13:37] Secondly, these mail delivery systems to provide the abortion pill can obviously be utilised for criminal purposes or reasons other than that which they are quote, unquote intended for. So, for example, you could have someone who acquires these pills nefariously and then utilises them for some purpose that is nefarious or criminal in nature. They might be utilising it to try and hide a sexual assault. They might be using it because they want to perpetrate a forced abortion on another person. Now, before you say, hold on a minute, isn't this just pro life conspiratorial thinking, wild conjecture? No, it's actually nothing of the sort. This is already happening and I want to look at some of the documented cases that we know about. You might have read this story that was doing the rounds in the last week or so about a lady called Rosalie in the United States. In a nutshell. Here's her story. She finds out she's pregnant. She's happy to have the baby. Her boyfriend initially seems supportive, but within a week or so he is pressuring her to try and have an abortion. She doesn't want to have the abortion. She tells him multiple times that she's not interested in an abortion. He then goes and acquires the abortion pill online, using her email address and under her name from an abortionist in California. And it is mail ordered to him. He then pressures her to take the abortion pill. She doesn't want to do it, but he stands over her and. And she says she is just afraid of being in this abusive situation. And so she thinks, okay, if I take the pill, I can then get home, I can vomit up the pills and I'll save my baby. Sadly, that does not happen and she lost her baby. But she's not the only one in a growing list of these kinds of and worse examples of exactly this. Forced abortions that have been carried out using abortion pills acquired by mail order. Let's read through these cases. In 2022, Jeffrey Smith was convicted of attempted first degree intentional homicide of an unborn child after he accessed the abortion pill and used it to spike the water of his child's mother, who was 21 weeks pregnant at the time and had refused to have an abortion. In 2024, Mason hearing accepted a plea deal after admitting he spiked his wife's water with an abortion drug in 2022. It was the couple's third child and she was born 10 weeks early with developmental delays. As a result of the drug, he was given probation, which he broke, landing him in jail. In 2024, Stuart Warby was sentenced to 17 years in prison for spiking his mistress's drink with abortion drugs he was able to secure from one of the largest abortion businesses in the uk. When he realised his mistress was not going to abort their baby, he crushed mifeprostone, the first drug drug of the abortion pill regimen, into orange juice, which she drank as they spoke about what his involvement would be in the baby's life. He then deceptively inserted misoprostol into her vaginally during sex.
[00:16:33] In 2024, Robert Kiwanda was charged with misleading a woman into taking misoprostol. He and the woman were dating when she became pregnant and when he found out about the pregnancy, he ordered mife, prostone and misoprostol online, pretending to be the woman. Then he had someone pose as a nurse from the hospital to tell her that her iron was low. He then gave her the abortion drugs, telling her they were iron pills. The woman trusted Kiwanda, as his dad was an obstetrics and gynaecology doctor. She took the pills and her baby died. In 2025, Justin Banter, who worked at the US Department of Justice, was charged with capital murder and tampering with evidence after slipping abortion pills into his pregnant girlfriend's drink in 2024. In 2025, David Benjamin Coutts pleaded guilty to second degree assault, tampering with a witness and fourth degree assault after he inserted an abortion drug into his mistress without her knowledge during sex. She went to the emergency room with heavy bleeding and the medical staff discovered the pills inside of her. Tragically, her baby did not survive. Coutts was sentenced to one year in prison.
[00:17:40] Also in 2025, Stephen Doohan was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for inserting an abortion drug into his mistress during sex. But it isn't just men who can access the drug and force a pregnant woman or teen to take it. In 2024, a mother in Louisiana ordered the abortion pill from a New York abortionist. The girl who did not want an abortion was made to take the pills by her mother and the girl ultimately experienced serious complications and and was taken to the hospital. The mother and the abortionist were indicted on felony charges for a criminal abortion. And these are just some examples that we know about so far. It is also highly conceivable that there are other cases that we just don't know about due to the fact that people are involved in much more abusive situations and they are far too scared to speak out about what was done to them. Or possibly they just don't want to revisit the issue. They want to move on from the trauma that was done to them. They don't want to revisit the, this forced abortion that they were subjected to. Another reason why, I think, and these next two reasons, just to be clear, are not moral reasons about abortion. So I'm pro life and the reason I oppose abortion is on moral grounds because every abortion involves the deliberate killing of an innocent human being and it is always wrong to deliberately kill an innocent human being. These next two arguments against the methodology of, of mail order abortion pills are not issues about the moral status of abortion. But it seems to me that they do apply and are very relevant if you are someone who calls yourself pro choice on the issue of abortion. Because surely the whole point of the pro choice ideology is that it's based on prioritising women's wellbeing and women's health. And the next two reasons speak directly to that issue. This particular method of abortion is, is a higher risk abortion method. Again, this is not pro life conspiratorial thinking. We have data which clearly indicates this now. And you can see this, for example, right here in New Zealand playing out in our new abortion statistics over the last few years. Just like America, over 60% of abortions now involve the abortion pill method. And you can see what's happening quite clearly when you look at the detrimental outcomes to women who, who experience complications of their abortion. And in these situations. What we've seen now is an almost doubling of the number of post abortion complications that are being experienced by women in the last few years. And that is in direct correlation with this massive spike in the use of the abortion pill as the primary method. And again, you don't just need to look at correlation, you can actually see the causation listed in the actual abortion data that is published by the New Zealand government. So for example, this is the table from the abortion report pertaining to abortions in 2024. And you can see quite clearly there that when it comes to ema, which is the early medical abortion, the chemical or the abortion pill method, you can See that there is a much bigger problem here. So, for example, the complication of retained placenta products. And when they say products, that is an awful euphemism that is describing the remains of the unborn child. So retained placenta and human remains that have been retained in the womb after the use of an early medical abortion, 133 cases of that haemorrhage, 19 cases compared to just 4 with surgical infection, 110 cases after a chemical abortion versus just 4 with surgical, retained placenta and human remains and infection, altogether 18 cases of that from early medical abortions, only one from surgical haemorrhage and retained placenta and human remains, altogether six cases of those with an early medical abortion, only one with surgical, etc. Etc. We can see, like, for example, failed abortion, you have eight situations of that with an early medical abortion, you have zero with surgical. Now, this is not me arguing in favor of abortion methods. This is me pointing out the cold, hard reality that this is a higher risk method of abortion. And so the idea that you would put this into a courier bag and just send it to someone in almost near anonymity via mail order does not make any coherent sense at all. Especially if you are someone who claims to care about women's wellbeing, which speaks to the next issue, and that's the higher risk of trauma that is associated with this particular abortion method. We've known about this for some decades. So in other words, if you really care about women's wellbeing, why would you not only subject them to a method that is known to have a higher risk of trauma, but also that these women are in a situation where they are at home alone when they're undergoing this.
[00:22:44] Then of course, there is the fact that this Louisiana ruling upholds basic legal subsidiarity.
[00:22:52] And that, in a nutshell, is the idea that the competent and appropriate legal authorities at the local level, so at the state level here in Louisiana, they have a right to actually govern their people and to govern them well. And they've created laws. Those laws clearly seem to be supported by the people who are voting for the politicians in that region, otherwise they wouldn't be in power. They have been vested with the power to make these laws. And then what you have is the FDA making a ruling that undermines their legal, judicial, governance, subsidiarity. It directly undermines their ability to actually control what goes on in their own borders, the very jurisdiction, the very area that they are charged with overseeing and caring for. And so obviously it would make sense that you wouldn't have a situation like this. I guarantee you that if you are someone who is pro abortion on this issue, if the tables were turned and you had states that had very extreme abortion laws, and then you had a federal law that actually was restrictive of abortion, I am confident that you would not be in favour of that. And I guarantee you'd probably argue along the same lines I'm arguing now. Now, let's conclude by taking a look at some of the deeper ideologies and philosophers, factors at play in all of this that I think we should consider when you contemplate what's going on right now in regards to abortion pill access in this legal stash.
[00:24:17] Firstly, note the active presence of the manufacturers of the abortifacients in this legal stash.
[00:24:24] These are massive corporations with massive corporate profits at stake, make no mistake about that. And that's exactly why they're involved. This is not altruism.
[00:24:35] Last year in the United States there was somewhere in the vicinity of about 1.1 or closing in on 1.2 million abortions last year in the United States. Now, according to the data, 65% of all those abortions involved this particular abortion method, this abortion product that is manufactured and sold by these corporations.
[00:25:00] That would be about 732,205 abortions in total. Now it's hard to find data about what the wholesale cost is of this particular product. So what are these companies selling the product to the abortion places for? Like when someone carries out an abortion, the suppliers, the merchants of abortion, how much are they paying for this product?
[00:25:26] Uh, the best available information I have indicates that this is considered commercially sensitive information. So you just can't get hold of it. It may be out there somewhere, but it's very hard to access as far as I can tell. So what I did was I went and looked at what the retail cost of one of these abortions using this method would be. So if you went retail, what would you pay for an abortion pill via mail order? And there are differing degrees to this, but it seems the generally accepted range is anywhere between 3 to $800. So I took the lower end, $300 per abortion, and then I times that by the number of chemical abortions that have happened in the United States in the last year. And basically what that means is over a four year period there is approximately $1 billion that is trading hands here in this particular transaction involving abortion and these abortion products.
[00:26:26] And if you go to the higher end, obviously this is me just calculating it based on the lower end, even at the higher end, there is a lot more money. In fact, at the higher end, there is almost three times that amount of money that is changing hands in all of this. There is a lot financially that is at stake in all of this. So it is no surprise to see the manufacturers of this product getting themselves involved, inserting themselves right into this case, because they do stand to lose a lot at a deeper ideological level. You see here, I think, the cruel calculus of expediency and cost saving at play.
[00:27:04] The simple truth is that it is quicker and it is cheaper to actually send someone abortion drugs in the mail than it is to actually be with that person in an in person context. It costs a whole lot less, it's a whole lot quicker, and it saves you time and space in your hospital system. And so you can see the cruel calculus of this playing out. I think the same is true in other jurisdictions like ours here in New Zealand, as to why this is becoming a very favored approach.
[00:27:37] Another thing that has to be considered in all of this is the fact that the abortion pill and the widespread use of it, it's not just what happened with Roe v. Wade and how it's a way of circumventing legal restrictions, but it's also the fact that this comes hot on the heels of a time in history when less doctors were actually wanting to participate in abortions. So you had less doctors, less medical professionals who were lining up to participate in the awful business of deliberately ending the lives of unborn children. And so this provides you a very expedient and cost effective way of, of working around that particular problem, because you don't need to involve them in any major way anymore. One person who is an abortionist, for example, can supply a lot more of the abortion than you could previously when you had to require more doctors and others to be involved at a time in history when less doctors were interested in being involved. We are also in the period of the reign of bureaucracy, of what some call managerialism. And it seems to me, no doubt that this is all very much a manifestation of managerialism, this idea that you would use bureaucracy to manage the outcomes that you want. And what I sense in all of this and what I see is really the reign of the bureaucrats. And what I mean by that is that you can see how the bureaucracy of the FDA is effectively enabling practical policy outcomes at the local level that can override even the legislators and the courts at a state level. So you have federal bureaucrats who are able to craft and create outcomes that are not actually wanted by the people at the state level, and they wield more power. In fact, I was reading some commentary about this issue recently where someone was highlighting that it is very unusual for the Supreme Court. There's no real precedent for them actually overturning FDA rulings.
[00:29:38] And if that trajectory holds in this case, then what you will see really is the reign of the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats will wield more power than the Supreme Court. And of course, what's tied up in this too, is technocracy. Trust the experts, the technical experts will tell us what is permissible. But here's the thing. There's a moral component to this as well. In fact, there are multiple moral components. The moral component of how law should be actually, like, arrived at and carried out. Legal subsidiarity, for example. And also then the moral question involving this product, its use, and the destruction of innocent human lives. But those things are not even being considered. The technocrats look solely at technical specifications, and then they produce a bureaucratic ruling on this. So how will this all end up playing out? Like I said, it's anybody's guess. No one can accurately predict what will happen here.
[00:30:31] But if I had to guess, if you put a gun to my head, I have a suspicion that the Supreme Court might end up handing this back over to the FDA and the Trump administration to make some sort of ruling on. In other words, we'll await the outcome of their review just because of the previous legal precedents. However, I could be proven wrong. If the state of Louisiana is making compelling legal arguments that about their inability to govern effectively within their own jurisdiction as a result of this federal law, it will be a very interesting stash because it really will speak to the control of the bureaucrats versus the control of moral and legal principles.
[00:31:15] Like, the reality is that if you can effectively argue that bureaucrats should well, be able to overrule the local administrators, the local governors, the local leaders at a state level in their ability to protect. Protect their own borders and maintain their own legal jurisdictions, then you really are in a very dicey situation in that regard. Effectively, what it means is you've ceded control back into a centralized authority. It's hard to know, as I said, how it will play out, but if I was a betting man, I'm not looking too favorably at this. My hope of hopes, though, is that the Louisiana court ruling will stand. Why the other side will fight vociferously against this is because they will be keenly aware of the fact that if it's done in Louisiana, then other states are likely to adopt the same legislation if it's allowed. And if they do that, all of a sudden, that breaks their hegemony once again and their ability to smuggle abortions, and not just any old abortions, but abortions that present greater risk and abortions using a methodology that allow people to carry out coerced abortions, that stranglehold across the entirety of the country will be broken and you will not be able to do that anymore. And this speaks to something that has also been going on in the background, the fact that some more pro abortion states have enacted laws to protect the abortionists in their region who are mail ordering, who are shipping this abortion method, this abortion product to people in other states where they actually are not allowed to, under normal conditions, carry out abortions so liberally. And so this whole thing has become a massive issue and there is a very big battle that is playing out all over the place in regards to this particular issue. One thing that we should never forget, of course, is the spiritual reality and the moral reality of this to deliberately end the life of an innocent human human being is a grave injustice, regardless of our old or young or where they happen to be located right now, either inside or outside of a worm. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatchers. Hi there. If you're enjoying our content, then why not consider becoming a paid supporter of our work? You can do that at either Substack or Patreon, and the link for both are in the show notes for this episode. If you do become a supporter, then you'll get access to exclusive content, early release content, and also you'll be helping to fund all of the offline work that we do as well all of the youth camps and the events that we speak at and all that other stuff that happens that you don't see online.
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