More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Pregnant and need not to be? You have options—no matter where you live. Here’s what you need to know.
As we await the fate of Roe v. Wade, Ms. will spotlight the wide range of new telemedicine abortion providers springing up across the country in response to the recent removal of longstanding FDA restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone.
“It’s easy to target Planned Parenthood, but much harder to target every primary care office in the country,” said Dr. Michele Gomez, a self-proclaimed “activist physician” supporting fellow doctors who want to offer abortions as part of primary care.
A range of telemedicine abortion providers are springing up in the U.S. in response to the removal of FDA restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone—like Cindy Adam and Lauren Dubey, nurse practitioners and owners of Choix, a virtual clinic offering asynchronous telemedicine abortion services to people in California, Colorado and Illinois.
“It feels really cool that I can do this on a day-to-day basis,” Dubey said. “Cindy and I are at the forefront of telemedicine abortion, teaching other people how to do it, helping more people to do it and exposing the world to this new type of care. It is incredibly fulfilling, not just being an abortion provider and not just doing it via telehealth, but being at the forefront of abortion care in a new way.”
A range of telemedicine abortion providers are springing up in the U.S. in response to the removal of FDA restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone. Meet one provider: Dr. Deborah Oyer, the medical director of Cedar River Clinics, who has seen a 79 percent increase of medication abortion since adding telemedicine abortion, versus in-clinic only before COVID.
“I cannot begin to put into words the honor and privilege of being an abortion provider. People let me into their lives in the most intimate way. In some ways, there is a little more intimacy doing a telemedicine abortion right now versus an in-person one, because I actually get to see their unmasked faces.”
A wide range of telemedicine abortion providers are springing up across the country in response to the recent removal of longstanding FDA restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone.
Meet one provider: Robin Tucker, a nurse practitioner of women’s health and a certified nurse midwife who offers first-trimester medication abortion by phone call, video visit or online intake forms to patients in Virginia, Maryland and Maine.
“People say, this seems too good to be true, this just seems so easy, there has to be a catch.”
As abortion restrictions increase, clinics close, and the cost of abortion goes up, more and more women are ordering abortion pills online and taking them safely at home, with and without telehealth support. Traffic has spiked on the website of the abortion pill advocacy group Plan C, which shares information about how to buy abortion pills online and get them by mail in all 50 states. Over the last several months, Plan C’s website has had over 200,000 visitors with 88 percent new visitors. A quarter of them have come from Texas.
But is it legal to purchase abortion pills online?
Advance provision of abortion pills is a growing trend among clinicians. This model could significantly shorten the time between the decision to end a pregnancy and having an abortion, and short circuit the medically-unnecessary obstacle course that currently exists in many states for people trying to access medication abortion.
Access to telehealth abortion services has expanded greatly throughout the pandemic. The inclusion of telehealth options in Power to Decide’s Abortion Finder tool allows patients to find out with a few clicks if they can get abortion pills mailed using telehealth.
While the Supreme Court prepares to hear cases about Texas’s abortion ban S.B. 8, activists on the ground are providing support for college students, who are uniquely impacted by the law.
On the heels of Texas’s newly-enacted abortion ban—blocked by a federal court on Oct. 6, then reinstated on Oct. 8 by the Fifth Circuit Court—Governor Greg Abbott signed into law S.B. 4 making it a felony for doctors to mail abortion pills to a patient. The law applies only to doctors and explicitly exempts pregnant people from criminal penalties for ordering pills online.
But unless Texas is willing to post abortion police at every woman’s mailbox to check and intercept her mail, Texans will still have access to medication abortion online and through the mail.
Before the six-week abortion ban takes effect on Wednesday, abortion pill advocacy group Plan C and Progress Texas drove a mobile billboard truck around West Texas for three days to educate people about how they can access abortion pills online.
“We went on an abortion road trip to let people know that you don’t need to go on a road trip anymore to get an abortion.”
