She’s right: I did feel a little rush when I got my first pills. I’d expected the whole thing to be onerous. And so, probing for hidden difficulties, I tried again, and again.

In the last year, I’ve ordered abortion pills from four different online pharmacies. The process was sometimes sketchy. There were poorly translated websites and customer-service reps messaging me over Skype with the greeting “yo.” I declined to pursue one order because the site asked me to wire money to a random address in India. After I filled out its consultation form, Aid Access sent me an email asking me if I really am pregnant, as I have a man’s name and “the woman must confirm” that she is ordering the drugs of her own accord; since I’m a man and not pregnant, I didn’t place the order.

But most of my orders came through fine. Each of the three pill packages I got cost me between $200 and $300, including expedited shipping. (The average cost of an abortion in the United States is about $500.)

I spent months looking for a lab that would test my pills; many waved me off, wary of controversy. Finally, I got in touch with Alan Wu, chief of the clinical chemistry laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital, whose lab tested a couple of my mifepristone tablets. The finding: They were authentic. I wasn’t surprised; in a more comprehensive study conducted by Gynuity Health and Plan C, published last year in the journal Contraception, researchers in four states ordered abortion pills from 16 different online pharmacies, and found they were all just what they said they were.

Each time I got a pack of pills in the mail, I was increasingly bowled over: If this is so easy, how will they ever stop this? I’ve been watching digital markets for 20 years, and I’ve learned to spot a simple, powerful dynamic: When something that is difficult to get offline becomes easy to get online, big changes are afoot.

Which is not to say that everyone is on board with the online market for pills. While there’s a growing consensus in the American medical establishment that restrictions on abortion drugs no longer make medical sense, I spoke to several abortion-rights advocates who worried about a parade of horrors that might swamp the movement if the underground online pill market were left to grow unfettered: women getting fake pills, getting ripped off, getting ill, getting slipped pills by men or getting prosecuted.

The activists building the online pill network acknowledge that there are potential dangers in the market — but they insist that the risks are far smaller than many guess. In a study of more than 1,000 Irish women who obtained pills from Women on Web, a pill-dispensing group Gomperts created in 2005, fewer than 1 percent reported adverse effects requiring further medical attention. “Providing abortions this way is as safe as a clinic-based abortion,” Gomperts told me.