More Than A Magazine, A Movement
While widely known as an abortion pill, mifepristone is very effective for treating fibroids and may also be effective for treating endometriosis and depression. Yet the drug is not available to use for these serious conditions because the FDA tightly restricts the medication due to intense anti-abortion pressure.
But that may soon change.
The overseas voter mobilization group Democrats Abroad and NARAL Pro-Choice America are organizing to inform American Democrats living abroad about the alarming state of abortion rights in the U.S. and what they can do stop anti-abortion laws and increase abortion access for people living stateside.
After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to discuss voting restrictions and other cultural issues, activists and lawmakers are fighting back against Republicans’ extreme agenda.
Abbott is “pushing forward an agenda that is over-politicized and all predicated on a big lie,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “We’re calling this ‘the suppression session.’”
With an unprecedented 90 abortion restrictions enacted across 18 states, 2021 has become the worst year for abortion rights and access in U.S. history.
“If you are not enraged, you are not paying attention.”
As many as 93 percent of students at public universities in Massachusetts are more than 30 minutes away from the closest abortion facility via public transportation. A new bill in Massachusetts tackles this barrier by ensuring access to abortion pills at public university health centers.
Similar to how ending criminal sodomy laws paved the way to legalizing same-sex marriage, removal of the FDA restriction on mifepristone is essential to normalizing telemedicine abortion and will be an important tool for advocates as they lobby states to eliminate telemedicine abortion bans.
The reproductive justice lawyers network If/When/How launched a nationwide Repro Legal Defense Fund—a first-of-its-kind resource to support women and others investigated, arrested or prosecuted for self-managed abortion.
Self-managed abortion is when someone ends a pregnancy outside of a clinical setting, such as buying abortion pills online and using them without medical supervision. RLDF provides money for bail and legal representation.
Dr. Jamie Phifer, founder and medical director of Abortion On Demand: “It’s called Abortion On Demand for a reason. It’s provocative, I know. But when you’ve already decided that you don’t want to continue your pregnancy, especially if you have pregnancy symptoms, making people wait doesn’t feel right to me. … Abortion care is easy. Medically speaking, it is easy enough that a robot could do it. So we built the robot.”
The day after the Supreme Court announced they would hear the Mississippi abortion ban case, internet searches related to self-managed abortion surged across the United States, especially in states hostile to abortion rights. Online searches for terms related to abortion pills such as “misoprostol” and “medical abortion” exploded by more than 5,000 percent in the 24 hours after the Court’s announcement—evidence a post-Roe world would be quite different because we now have extremely safe and highly effective abortion pills that are easy to obtain and use.
As red states increasingly pass abortion bans and the Supreme Court is now reviewing a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, Aid Access and other online providers of abortion pills are likely to play an increasingly important role in helping people access abortion.
“As legislators make in-clinic abortion harder and harder to get, people are having to look for viable alternatives.”
