Sound advice for anyone providing abortion pills
If you're going to help your friends in abortion hostile states obtain abortion pills, for the love of the old gods and the new, DO NOT DO IT OVER IMESSAGE OR FB OR INSTA.
get a burner phone. use library computers. please stop doing criminal shit in a way that you'll get got.
— 🤌🏾 Imani Gandy 👆🏾 (@AngryBlackLady) March 13, 2023
And again if you take abortion pills and end up in the hospital and healthcare workers ask you what you took, YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL THEM. DO NOT TELL THEM.
— 🤌🏾 Imani Gandy 👆🏾 (@AngryBlackLady) March 13, 2023
As Michelle Goldberg points out in her column today in the New York Times (gift link, no paywall):
Abortion Opponents Want to Make Women Afraid to Get Help From Their Friends
…In text messages that are now part of a chilling lawsuit, her friends responded with warmth and solidarity. One told her about Aid Access, an organization based in Vienna that ships abortion pills to people in places where abortion is banned. Then the same friend texted that she had found someone nearby who could supply the medication. She and another friend both offered to let the woman go through the abortion at their homes. “Mistakes happen,” the second friend texted. “You can’t spiral. Hopefully this is the slap in the body that you need to remove yourself from him.”
Now the ex-husband, Marcus Silva, is getting his revenge. Last week, he filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against his ex-wife’s two friends and the woman who allegedly provided the abortion pills his ex-wife took, seeking a million dollars from each of them. (Because the suit seems likely to send abuse their way, I’m not including the women’s names.)…
We have real enemies out there, people who are more than willing to do harm to us and to other women. Please take care of yourself and your friends.
I’ll post more soon about self-managed abortions, as this is a subject we’re all going to need to understand, probably quite soon.
ETA: Here is a useful resource from the Abortion Resources Page linked above: provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this is Reproductive Justice, digital safety tips for providers and for people seeking abortions.