It has been four years since the Supreme Court officially deleted Roe v. Wade, and the entire political landscape is still absolutely tilted. Back on June 24, 2022, Justice Samuel Alito dropped the hammer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, writing that "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start" and that decades of judicial activism had only made the national debate worse. Red states immediately loaded up their pre-packaged "trigger laws" to ban the practice, thinking they had finally won the map. But instead of settling the issue, the rules of the game just changed.

In a hilarious twist of administrative irony, the total number of abortions in America has actually gone up every single year since Roe was overturned. If you thought banning something in twelve states would make the numbers drop, you clearly underestimated the power of internet workarounds and the United States Postal Service. The post-Dobbs meta is all about bypassing local servers entirely.

First, blue states decided to optimize their legal code. They stripped away classic regulatory hurdles like mandatory waiting periods and parental permission slips. This made it incredibly easy for people to travel to legal states for a quick procedure. But traveling is expensive, so progressive lawyers developed an even better exploit: the "shield law."

Shield laws are essentially a legal VPN for abortion providers. Doctors sitting in deep-blue states can log onto Zoom or pick up the phone, prescribe chemical abortion pills to a patient sitting in a deep-red state where it’s banned, and the local state police can't touch them. The entire transaction happens in the cloud, completely bypassing the local jurisdiction.

Once the digital prescription is cleared, the physical product is sent straight through the mail or picked up at a neighborhood drugstore. Because of this telemedicine loophole, the number of abortions in states with active bans has actually increased. Red state legislatures passed laws that are physically impossible to enforce when the postman is delivering the product directly to the door.

Justice Alito is, predictably, not amused by this digital bypass. In a recent dissent regarding these mail-order medications, Alito called out the obvious, writing that what we are seeing is "the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs." He pointed out that Dobbs was supposed to let states run their own show, not let other states mail policy changes across borders.