The panic started once Jayda took the test in early July. It came back positive and a quick calculation suggested she was seven weeks pregnant. It was a bad time. Her mother had just passed away and Florida, the state where she lived, had introduced restrictions in April that prevented people from making arrangements for abortion pills via telehealth. Jayda, who is in her late twenties and has asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, attempted to make a personal appointment with Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides sexual health care in the US. But the waiting time was two weeks. “That seemed like a lifetime away,” she says.
Instead, she turned to the unregulated world of websites selling abortion pills or MTP kits — a combination of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, used to terminate pregnancies. As restrictions have been tightened in US states, an intercontinental network of companies and nonprofits has sprung up to ship these pills to places where access is restricted. Some are motivated by ideology, others by profit and opportunism. But they all fall into a legal gray area, where regulators seem unable or unwilling to exercise authority.
Jayda discovered this network after frantically Googling a website called Plan C, which lists online pharmacies that ship abortion pills to US states. She threw herself into the options. “I was in a panic,” she says. “I wanted the pills as soon as possible and didn’t want to pay a fortune for them, but I also wanted them to be as legit as possible.”
One online pharmacy, AbortionRX, stood out. Stock images of grinning women illustrated the website’s home page, and the text felt awkward, as if it had been written by someone who was not fluent in English. But AbortionRX promised to get the pills in Florida in eight days in exchange for $250. Women on Reddit had shared their positive experiences. “Website looks a bit sketchy, but they are legit,” read one post. That was the reassurance Jayda needed. She clicked “order now” and paid.
AbortionRX’s web address was registered from Amsterdam, according to the domain registrar’s records. The packaging suggested that the pills Jayda received contained one 200mg mifepristone tablet and four 200mg misoprostol tablets, and were manufactured by Indian drug giant Zydus. They had been shipped from India to an unknown location in the US, where they were waiting for a buyer. AbortionRX did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but when WIRED asked a customer service representative where the pills came from, the person replied, “We ship the US to the US.” Jayda’s pills were in a modest little brown envelope with a California return address.
“We do not own this product and currently we do not market it in India or any other region,” said a Zydus spokesperson when asked about the company’s affiliation with Zydus branded abortion pills.
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“Most of the pills we see are from Indian manufacturers,” said Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of Plan C. “They may come directly from those companies, but I suspect not. and somehow buys pills in bulk and ships them.” Abortion pills can be bought in pharmacies for about $5 in many countries, she says.
One of those entrepreneurs is a man under the alias Chris Jones. Jones, who refused to give his real name in case his surgery became illegal, runs the Medside24 website, which is also on Plan C. He started the company in Moscow before moving to Kazakhstan’s capital, Almaty, after Russia invaded Ukraine. All of the company’s customers are located in the US, he says, and most are referred from Plan C. Medside24 sells an average of 15 abortion kits a day at what Jones describes as a 50 percent profit margin.
