More Than A Magazine, A Movement
When the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade later this month, clinics in states with legal abortion will be inundated with patients, creating long waits for in-clinic abortion care.
To address this anticipated influx of patients, California-based Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Fund (WRRAP) has created a new “abortion pills by mail” program to fund telehealth abortion providers in 20 states.
In December of 2021, the FDA lifted some of its burdensome restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, including the requirement that healthcare providers must meet in-person with patients to dispense the medication. Nineteen states, however, continue to impose in-person dispensing requirements.
Legal scholars and advocates are questioning the constitutionality of these additional restrictions on abortion pills.
Hey Jane provides medication abortion for anyone who is at least 18 years old, medically eligible, up to 10 weeks pregnant, and located in New York, California, Washington, Illinois, Colorado or New Mexico.
“Doctor’s appointments can be very difficult to get. With Hey Jane, we can get medication to patients in like a day.” Hanna Kim, lead nurse for Hey Jane, told Ms. “Patients feel really cared for. I remember one email that said, ‘I felt like I was talking to a mom or a sister who had all the answers.'”
The Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline (M+A Hotline) was founded in 2019 by two primary care physicians who knew people were self-managing their abortions at home but often had questions and would go to the internet looking for answers. Dr. April Lockley is a family medicine physician in New York City and medical director of the M+A Hotline (1-833-246-2632).
“Since the beginning of time, people and communities have taken care of themselves without going to the doctor because of how the system is set up. It’s inequitable. It’s racist. And so people have always taken care of themselves. We’re a support to say, ‘This process is going as it should.'”
As we await the fate of Roe, Ms.’s “Online Abortion Provider” series 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.
Dr. Razel Remen, an independent abortion provider in Detroit, provides telemedicine abortion for people in Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. She offers medication abortion pills to people 14 and older through 11 weeks of pregnancy. “If I had not done my residency in Alabama, I would not have become an abortion provider. It made me realize that lack of access to abortion not only negatively impacted individual people, but also their families and communities.”
As states across the U.S. continue to restrict abortion access, people in states that ban telemedicine abortion are increasingly turning to European doctors to access abortion pills. New research definitively shows that people served by Austria-based telemedicine abortion provider Aid Access have had highly positive experiences with the service, with very low rates of complications reported.
After the Supreme Court allowed the Texas six-week abortion ban SB 8 to go effect on September 1 last year, Austria-based telemedicine abortion provider Aid Access saw a sharp rise in Texans requesting abortion pills.
Researchers say that self-managed medication abortion could help preserve reproductive autonomy in the event of a Roe v. Wade reversal this June.
Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, Dutch physician and medication abortion pioneer, has a long history of working to provide abortion pills in countries with barriers to abortion healthcare. Whether through the mail, on a ship or via drone, Gomperts has continued to find creative ways to get pills into the hands of those who need them.
“It’s really a privilege to be able to do it. It’s empowering for me, as well as for the people using the service. And it’s also empowering for the doctors to join the service. I think everybody really feels very excited about it.”
As we await the fate of Roe v. Wade, Ms.’s “Online Abortion Provider” series 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. One such provider is Dr. Alison Case, a family medicine doctor in Indiana. After Texas banned most abortions last year and Texans began flooding into New Mexico for abortion health care, Whole Woman’s Health offered Case the opportunity to provide telemedicine abortion to patients in New Mexico.
“We should make sure people have their own autonomy in making decisions for themselves about when to have a family and when not to have a family. These are really basic things. If we can’t get those services to people in person, then it’s great that we can offer them virtually. Particularly in the case of Texas, where we know there’s a whole state where people are not able to access 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. Abortion provider carafem now offers telemedicine abortion in 11 states—Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Virginia and Vermont—plus the District of Columbia.
“We are crystal clear about what we do. Hence the tagline, ‘Abortion. Yeah, we do that,'” said Melissa Grant, carafem’s chief operations officer.