More nonpregnant women are requesting abortion pills to have on hand
Requests for abortion pills by women who weren't pregnant spiked when abortion rights were threatened, new research finds. A new abortion case is before the Supreme Court.
Requests for abortion pills by women who were not yet pregnant spiked after a draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision leaked in 2022, a study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found.
The study looked at data from Aid Access, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that provides access to abortion medications via telehealth. Aid Access was also involved with the study.
At the time the data was collected, the organization connected patients with doctors from outside the U.S. who could prescribe the two drugs used in a medication abortion — mifepristone and misoprostol — which were then shipped to the patient at a cost of $110.
Usually, this is done for people who are already pregnant, but the researchers found that the number of women who sought the drugs pre-emptively, through a little-known process called advance provision, increased when federal protections for abortion and for access to medication abortion were threatened.
“The surges or spikes in requests really coincide with threats to abortion access,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She said she expects requests to rise again this year, with mifepristone access before the Supreme Court.
Rating: 5