It’s not yet clear whether, after Dobbs, authorities will choose to prosecute people for involvement in networks like Cruz’s. Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for the Texas Alliance for Life, argues that state law already allows for the extradition on felony charges of those who bring abortion drugs into Texas from other states. However, extradition of people who reside outside the country is a federal matter and, she speculates, would likely not happen without the election of a President with anti-abortion views.
Even within Texas and other states with strong laws against abortion facilitators, the politics of enforcing penalties is complex, in part because the belief that abortion equals murder doesn’t appear to be widespread. A survey released last month found that, among Texas voters, sixty per cent favored abortion being “available in all or most cases,” while only ten per cent supported banning abortion completely. In this political context, David Donatti, a civil-rights attorney at the A.C.L.U. of Texas, says, “conservative legislators would benefit just as much from pretending no abortions are happening as they would from prosecuting abortions.”
Early on in her American mission, trying to assess the sorts of risks volunteers might encounter crossing the border with pills, Verónica Cruz arranged a trial run. Five hundred pills arrived in Texas unhindered. Her methods for determining whether the people she chose to make the runs were sincere and not setting her up for trouble were somewhat less concrete. She made those decisions, she said, “by feeling.” When Claire, a California woman who spent part of the year in Mexico, heard about the network and contacted Cruz about becoming a pill runner, she didn’t get an assignment immediately. Instead, Cruz came to her house in San Miguel and spent hours “sniffing me out,” Claire said. Claire didn’t know about the Old Hippies and didn’t need to. As Cruz said once she came to trust Claire, one person could be a network of her own.
Claire slipped her first batch of pills into the States in May, and mailed packages to women all over the country. Three months later, shortly before her second run, she dashed through an artisan market, past a woman charring corn over an open flame, to a stall that sold flower-shaped earrings crafted by Huichol people in the Sierra Madre mountains. Each piece was made of colorful glass beads.
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
“Hola, ¿cuánto cuesta? ”
“Cincuenta pesos.”
Two dollars and fifty cents. Paying in cash, she bought twenty pairs of earrings—sunflowers, camellias, roses—to camouflage the abortion pills she’d be bringing back to the U.S. She would put the earrings in cardboard jewelry boxes that had a layer of cotton padding. The earrings would go on top of the cotton, and the pills would be embedded inside, the better to keep a husband or parent from finding them. But Claire, who had had two abortions herself, liked the idea of placing earrings in every package for reasons other than discretion. “It’s so stressful to be pregnant when you don’t want to be,” she said. “You have all these hormones going, you don’t like the way your body feels, you just want it to be over, and so I thought, It’d be nice to get a pair of earrings when you’re in that kind of mood. You know, an abortion and a present!”
She made her way out of the market, past portable shrines for the Virgin of Guadalupe and hearts of blown glass, and ran home, where Cruz was waiting at her door, navy-blue backpack in hand. “Little earrings,” Claire called out, “para las chicas! ”
At the kitchen counter, Cruz unzipped the backpack and pulled out blister packs of mifepristone and misoprostol, and Claire took a pair of scissors from a drawer. They cut open each of the packs, combining six pills of misoprostol with one of mifepristone—usually sufficient for one abortion. Each envelope would also contain instructions on the abortion process which Cruz and Claire had written together. The notes ended, “Hugs, the pill fairy.”
The pills that Claire and other fairies would be sending remained cheaper to obtain from a Mexican pharmacy than from a doctor in the U.S. But, after Dobbs, the price of a box of Pfizer pills in several establishments in San Miguel de Allende had markedly increased. In one pharmacy, the price rose from about two thousand pesos per box to more than three thousand, or from roughly a hundred dollars to a hundred and sixty. The cost of generic misoprostol fluctuated wildly—forty-five dollars in one pharmacy, seventeen in another—and at the nearby Costco you could encounter two different prices for the drug in a single day. If the inflation seen in San Miguel pharmacies suggested private-sector opportunism, it might also have reflected well-meaning expats dominating the market, clearing the shelves on behalf of Americans and, in the process, jacking up the price of abortion for Mexican women—an ethical dilemma that some of Cruz’s associates had yet to think deeply about.
As they divvied up pills, Claire mentioned to Cruz that crossing the border with pharmaceuticals was not, for her, a big deal. “I have Global Entry,” she said. “I’ve never been stopped by customs in my life.” But, when she’d asked a friend if she would consider joining her as a pill runner, the friend had responded, “I’m Black. I can’t do that. Isn’t that obvious to you?”
On Claire’s first mission, she’d sent pills to women in seven states where, if her actions were discovered, they could be seen as a crime. But she was given less to paranoia than to curiosity. Preparing to send her first lot of pills, she had Googled the addresses where they would land: trailer parks, run-down apartments, a house valued at thirty-four thousand dollars. She’d envisioned women with other children and tapped-out bank accounts who couldn’t travel out of state for an abortion. She had to force herself not to Google any further, should authorities uncover the digital footprint she now regretted having created. This time, she had resolved simply to cross the border, mail the earrings and pills in an envelope with a fake return address, pay the post office in cash, take a photo of the tracking number, and destroy all receipts. She would later delete the photo of the tracking number, too.
Finishing up, as salsa music drifted in from another room, Claire asked Cruz about the varieties of civil disobedience that led the Mexican Supreme Court to decriminalize abortion. Cruz told her that she thought of herself as part of an ant colony: one of countless workers toiling beneath an unbroken surface, carving intricate paths toward their goal. “Was all of this hidden from the public eye?” Claire wondered. Cruz shook her head. From the start, Las Libres members defied the system openly. In the United States, as in Mexico, Cruz predicted, the more people who got involved in the movement, the harder it would be for anyone to stop it.
A few days later, as Cruz trained future acompañantes in Yucatán, Claire packed abortion pills and earrings in a carry-on alongside her perfume, oregano-oil capsules, and shea butter and caught an early-morning bus to the airport in Mexico City.
“Bringing anything back, Ma’am?” the customs agent asked when she arrived in San Francisco.
“Just some souvenirs.”
Handing her passport back, the agent said, “Welcome home.”
When you risk years in prison to distribute abortion pills to women who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access them in Texas, you tend to appreciate more straightforward aspects of existence. So Anna delighted in an okra plant in her small garden that, by September, had sprung up to twice her height. Her tomatoes were thriving, as were the rosemary and parsley, and one day, as she picked up some jalapeño seeds left over from a seasonal planting, it occurred to her to hide pills in a packet of seeds. You never knew which recipient might have a patch of dirt in which to plant them.
It had taken some time for Las Libres to find collaborators like Anna. After S.B. 8 went into effect, Cruz and her colleagues identified thirty abortion-rights groups in Texas that they thought might be interested in receiving pills from Mexico. The first meeting of the Mexican and American activists had been awkward, though. The Mexicans had gathered in a conference room; the Texans joined the meeting individually, via Zoom. Most of their cameras were off, and the sound was bad. At the end of the meeting, when Cruz asked who was interested in collaborating, only one person raised her hand. There followed a long silence, until one of the Texans unmuted her sound. “The law has won,” she said. “They accomplished what they wanted: scare us to the point where we feel there is nothing to be done.” Only later did messages from some of the participants begin to trickle in, on Signal. They had been reluctant to assert their intention on a video call, but they were ready to work with Cruz.
Anna’s first move had been to post on social media that she could be of help to women in need—a post that never mentioned abortion directly. She said the same to strangers and friends in bars and cafés, just as Cruz used to do in Mexico, even as the penalties she might face increased.
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
Many of Anna’s pills almost certainly came from the Old Hippies of San Miguel de Allende, but she eschewed such precise information, for her own protection and that of others. She found mailing the pills especially nerve-racking; for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she chose as a fake return address a shopping mall where, in third grade, she’d made a joyful trip with her mom to get her ears pierced. It was better to hand off the pills in person, she thought, because those exchanges were harder for authorities to track and safer for women who lived in homes where an envelope with a dubious return address might be opened by the wrong hands.
The Post-Roe Abortion Underground
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