FDA says abortion pills can be sent by mail | Hacker News Reader

FDA says abortion pills can be sent by mail

cnn.com

Seems reasonable to me. It's an approved medicine for home use, so you should be able to get it in any way you can get other such medicines.

> But a new study published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, which reviewed data from more than 84,000 abortions, found no increase in complications after Canada made mifepristone available by a doctor's prescription in 2017.

Canada made it available in 2017 with a prescription with no increase in complications. This policy update is long overdue considering the challenges of obtaining healthcare in the US.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064598531/the-fda-could-perm...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2109779

It might seem simple, but Christians wield immense power in America and will not hesitate to attempt to make their beliefs legislation. Opposition to this isn't coming from a logical argument about legality, it's about hindering abortion access at all costs.

Uber broke the dictature of the local medalion laws, AirBnb broke the dictature of the local zoning and hotel laws,... I think there is a similarly or even larger business opportunity at technology based breaking of the dictature of those conservative/Christian/etc. forces at local and state levels.

In this case it'd be a much smaller subversion than AirBnb/Uber's as we've had fully legal medicine deliverable by mail for a long time.

Apples to oranges. Functionally no one builds their identity politics around being "pro-taxi-medallions" or "pro-zoning". In contrast, one of the major players in American politics made a concerted effort to fabricate a wedge issue (to mask their actual policies having become socially unpalatable), and spent decades pushing that narrative to cement it into identity politics.

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-ri...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opinion/abortion-evangeli...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734303135/throughline-traces-...

> ... relaxing the federal regulations could have some effect in maintaining access in the face of a Supreme Court ruling that guts abortion rights. If conservative-led states are allowed to fully prohibit abortion, it is likely that abortion seekers -- particularly in the South and Midwest -- will have to drive hundreds of miles to reach their nearest clinics.

It's a policy hack to circumvent state legislatures that may restrict it, which is probably the more interesting part of the issue. I understand it tactically, but it seems like an inflection point on the integrity of the union. It's a weak move that signals a lack of popular assent, and suggests federalism is on its back foot even without its critics in power.

The issue is the lynchpin of individual feminine autonomy and the question of whether a society is contstructed to serve men and women as equals, or the society provides people exceptions and relief from every other harsh element and conseqeunce of nature except this one - and then what the demarcation point of this society and its laws happens to be.

It is a very pragmatic and necessary natural freedom, but it's a very thorny right to enforce with anything less than a "shall make no law" constitutional amendment about bodily integrity, and it seems almost easier to argue about moralities and legalisms around abortion than to reconcile the enforcement of it as a right with the powers, legitimacy, and the reach of a the state. I think articulating a constitutional amendment that makes a rule about the government instead of women is probably the best way to resolve it.

Is a state legally allowed to search and seize private post if something is against state law that isn’t against federal law? Or is that one reason the postal service is federal?

It's federal because the Constitution says so (see Section 8; Powers of Congress).

Items sent via USPS can be seized with a warrant. Items sent by other carriers do not need a warrant, just a suspicion.

Does this apply to other non-federal carriers (UPS/Fedex)?

The warrant requirement only applies to USPS. UPS, etc only need suspicion to provide parcels to law enforcement

I'm curious though if states in which purchase/use is illegal (by state law) can successfully have the sellers extradited for trial and/or seize their in-state assets.

Except the Constitution doesn't say so. Not anymore. Not with the current 6 right-wing votes on SCOTUS.

From here on out, the Constitution says whatever Judicial Watch and the Federalist Society say that it says.

Local authorities can get a warrant. They can also open packages deemed suspicious, without a warrant.

I'd expect packages from out-of-state pharmacies would be deemed "suspicious" and searched. And there's always the handy "exigent circumstances" (translation: We can do anything we want anyway).

I guess the good news is: It's unlikely there are dogs trained to sniff out this specific medication.

I imagine these pharmacies will use inconspicuous packaging when shipping to states that are known to be problematic. Short of opening and checking every single piece of mail, I doubt there’s much they can do.

> Short of opening and checking every single piece of mail, I doubt there’s much they can do.

They can't do something like x-raying them? I'd imagine that would be relatively easy (e.g. bubble pack with X pills, of a certain size, a certain distance apart), to the point where it could probably be automated.

That will probably be considered a search.

With a warrant, probably?

That's not why the postal service is federal though. Establishing a postal system is a power given to congress in the U.S. Constitution. "To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" Actually having a postal system run by the government was something that predates the U.S. constitution.

Can this be extended to arbitrary pharmaceutical drugs that are approved on the federal level?

Any logic a state uses to circumvent a constitutional right can be used to circumvent literally any other law, because if the logic can circumvent the actual constitution then by definition it can circumvent every other law.

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