Message from @pinetree

Signaling a new chapter in the battle over abortion access in the United States, a European organization has stepped into the fray, providing Americans a way to get doctor-prescribed pills by mail to medically induce abortions at home.

Called Aid Access, the organization says it uses telemedicine, including online consultations, to facilitate services for healthy women who are less than nine weeks pregnant. If a woman completes the consultation and is deemed eligible for a medical abortion, the organization's founder writes a prescription for the two pills used to terminate the pregnancy, misoprostol and mifepristone. Prescriptions are then sent to a pharmacy in India, which fills and mails orders to the U.S.

retiredDep

2018-10-29 16:00:29 UTC

There are other ways to get abortion pills by mail in the U.S., but Aid Access is the most affordable option at $95 and one that offers the possibility of financial help, as stated on its website. Plus, Aid Access is the only company to offer physician oversight, according to a report card issued by the grassroots group Plan C, which seeks to educate women about self-managed abortion.

retiredDep

2018-10-29 16:00:47 UTC

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, warns against buying mifepristone over the internet and says consumers who do so bypass distribution safeguards in place to protect them. As a result, the FDA said Tuesday morning that it's evaluating what Aid Access is doing "to assess potential violations of U.S. law."

Advocates for abortion access say restrictions on mifepristone distribution serve to prevent women, girls and transgender men from getting the medical care they need and want.

Aid Access's founder, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, said the FDA's handling of the drug is "based on politics, not science," and that the safety concerns the agency points to are "totally unfounded."

"That's the problem," she said. "I have no worries. Everything I do is according to the law."

retiredDep

2018-10-29 16:01:07 UTC

To serve women who don't have access'
Gomperts is not new to this work. Twelve years ago, her site, Women on Web, went live to offer a similar service to women living in countries where abortion is illegal. Think, for example, Ireland, Poland, and much of Latin America. Each month, she says, the Women on Web help desk receives 10,000 emails in 17 different languages.

Not everyone who reaches out needs or gets prescriptions. Women on Web mails out about 9,000 abortion pill packages each year, Gomperts said. Among those she's served: women in the U.S. military who are serving abroad and have nowhere to turn, she said.

The organization is available to answer questions about self-managed abortion and refer women to local clinics or resources they may not already know are available to them. Women on Web -- and now Aid Access, too -- is "not intended to replace existing services" but "to serve women who don't have access," Gomperts said.

retiredDep

2018-10-29 16:01:25 UTC

Since being quietly introduced in April, Aid Access has already fielded 3,000 requests for help from within the U.S., said Gomperts. And she's already written prescriptions for 600 women.

Those numbers are likely to jump, now that the initiative went public late last week -- a move spurred by the recent confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Abortion rights activists, including Planned Parenthood, have argued that Kavanaugh will usher in the end of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the US and made it a constitutional right in 1973.

A 'moral obligation'
Interest in and use of medical abortion in the U.S. has risen in recent years. A study published in 2015 showed the regimen to be about 97 percent effective.

retiredDep

2018-10-29 16:01:42 UTC

The protocol combines two drugs. Mifepristone blocks progesterone, a hormone needed to allow a pregnancy to continue. The second pill used in medical abortions, misoprostol, stimulates the uterus, causing it to cramp, bleed and contract -- thereby ending the pregnancy in what is essentially a miscarriage, Aid Access explains on its website.

Even as the overall number of abortions declined, medical abortions grew from 6 percent of nonhospital abortions in 2001 to 31 percent in 2014, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank. And in 2014, 45 percent of abortions before nine weeks of gestation were abortions induced by medication.

Searches online for ways to self-manage or self-induce abortions also indicate a growing demand for alternatives perhaps driven by barriers to clinic access due to financial hardship, geographic distance, fear of being publicly shamed or any number of reasons. Research published earlier this year showed that in a one-month period in 2017 nearly 210,000 Google searches in the U.S. were for information about self-abortion.