Women who want to have an abortion early in their pregnancies can take a combination of two drugs: misoprostol, whose brand name is Cytotec, and mifepristone, which is also called RU-486. They are both on the World Health Organization’s “List of Essential Medicines,” which means they are considered safe and effective. The combination can be used until about the tenth week of pregnancy, and the medications are already used in roughly a third of all abortions.

Misoprostol, which also treats ulcers, is available in pharmacies, and it’s about 85 percent effective in inducing an abortion on its own. It is much more effective when used with mifepristone, but FDA restrictions dictate that patients can’t receive mifepristone even at a retail pharmacy, and possibly not through the mail, either. Most abortion providers think it’s really only legally safe to dispense mifepristone to patients directly, in person. In some places, like the Hawaiian island of Kauai, there are no abortion providers, and women must take a 300-mile round-trip flight to get an abortion. So instead, many turn to Google.

Abigail Aiken, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted interviews with 32 people from 20 states who sought out abortion pills online for a study she and her colleagues published last week. She found women turned to mail-order abortions because a clinic-based abortion was too expensive, or because state restrictions around abortions—like waiting periods and ultrasound laws—were too onerous. Some just preferred the privacy and convenience of doing their own abortion at home.

These online abortion pill pharmacy websites, though, seem to give the women pause. They seem illegitimate and are riddled with broken English: “In this recession growing economy were we can’t afford more childrens, we need some source which can be easily available online,” one website notes. Some of the websites pop up, then shut down unexpectedly. It would be difficult for these same pharmacies to open up in the U.S., since FDA regulations require pharmacy patients to have prescriptions. In the end, none of the people Aiken interviewed ordered the pills, instead opting for unreliable herbal treatments or a last-minute clinic visit.

For a study published earlier this year, Elizabeth Raymond, a senior medical associate at the research organization Gynuity, Googled phrases like “buy abortion pills online.” The researchers ended up ordering 18 of the pill combinations from 16 different websites, none of which required a prescription. The pills came from India, where there is a large generic-drug industry. Shipments cost between $110 and $360, and the packages took between three days and three weeks to arrive.

Even then, it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, as Raymond and her co-authors write:

Two buyers received troubling communications from product vendors. One warned about the legality of purchasing online: “Please do not share this info with any other side because investigation team is searching the details for this type of medicine.” In the second case, the vendor complained that he was unable to get payment from the online payment platform and threatened to withhold shipment until the buyer paid another way. After some convincing, he finally sent the product. In addition, one buyer who paid with Western Union received two fraud alert calls—one from Western Union advising against purchasing pharmaceuticals online and another from her credit card company.

Raymond noticed that some of the blister packs of pills were broken. “It’s our speculation that the shippers are afraid that the customs service will be able to feel through the packaging and see that that there are pills in there, so they crush the blister pack,” she says.