It’s been four years since the Supreme Court decided to shake up the whole country and throw out Roe v. Wade. Back on June 24, 2022, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the big decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, saying straight up that "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start." He claimed he was going to settle the drama, but all it did was start a legal war. Red states immediately activated their "trigger laws," locking down abortion clinics and making it a crime to get the procedure done in over a dozen states.

But if you know how the world works, you know that banning something doesn’t make it go away—it just changes the game. In a wild twist that’s got the politicians scratching their heads, the total number of abortions across America has actually gone up every single year since they took the federal right away. The state-level bans didn't stop a thing because the internet and the mail carriers are running a whole different play.

First off, the states that support abortion rights cleared the runway. They got rid of all the annoying red tape—no more mandatory waiting periods, no more needing parental permission. This made it way easier for people with some cash to just travel to another state to get their healthcare handled. But if you’re broke and living in a state with a ban, traveling isn't that simple. That's where the new "shield laws" come into play.

These shield laws are basically a legal armor set up by blue states. They protect doctors who use telemedicine—over the phone or on the internet—to prescribe abortion pills to patients living in states where it’s totally banned. The local police in the banned states can't do anything to the doctors because the blue states refuse to hand them over.

Once the doctor writes the script online, the pills get shipped straight through the mail or sent to a local pharmacy for pickup. It's a whole digital bypass. Because of this telemedicine hustle, the number of abortions for people living in banned states has actually increased. They tried to lock the front door, but the streets found the back window through the postal service.

Justice Alito is heated about this, too. In a recent dissent about these abortion pills, he called out the whole operation, saying it’s nothing but "the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs." Alito wanted each state to have total control over its borders, but the internet doesn't care about state lines.

This whole situation has Donald Trump caught in a major political trap during this midterm year. His hand-picked judges are the ones who hooked up the conservatives with the Dobbs victory in the first place, but now Trump and his team are staying quiet on the issue. He knows the math: the voters who put him in office in 2024 include a lot of independents who want abortion to stay legal, and he can't afford to make them mad.