The Biden government has decided to allow women to receive abortion pills by mail for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest development in an issue that has increasingly taken center stage in the US abortion debate.
In a letter The acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, representing two leading organizations representing reproductive health doctors on Monday, said the agency would temporarily suspend the requirement that the first of two drugs that should end an early pregnancy be in a medical clinic to enforce.
The new policy in January opposed a Supreme Court ruling that sided with the Trump administration, which appealed to a federal judge last year to suspend the requirement. The judge argued that the requirement for women to be endangered during the pandemic is because they will have to visit clinics in person and often travel long distances to do so.
Medication abortion, first approved by the FDA in 2000, is increasingly becoming women’s preferred method of terminating a pregnancy. As of 2017, research estimates that about 60 percent of abortion patients early enough in pregnancy to be eligible – ten weeks pregnant or less – preferred medication abortion over suction or surgery.
But the FDA requires that the first drug in the dual medication regimen, mifepristone, be dispensed in clinics or hospitals by specially certified physicians or other medical providers. Reproductive health experts have for years insisted that the requirement be lifted due to the fact that there are no significant safety reasons for the isolation of a pill that women may then legally take anywhere, and that the restriction places the greatest burden on women with low incomes and those in areas with limited access to abortion providers.
With the permission of the FDA, researchers have been conducting a study for several years that offers telemedicine consultations to women seeking abortions and sending them the pills by e-mail. Their research found that the approach is safe and effective.
Additional data has been collected in recent months on the experiences of women during the pandemic who received abortion pills by mail after the judge lifted the restriction and before the Supreme Court reinstated it.
Dr. Acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock wrote in her letter to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine that studies on the pandemic experience “apparently show no increase in serious safety issues,” such as bleeding. , ectopic pregnancy or the need for surgery “which occurs during medical abortion due to changes in the person’s dispensing during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Groups opposing abortion have objected to the decision. Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, said in a statement that allowing appointments for abortion of drugs via telemedicine poses a “serious danger” to the safety of women, adding that “chemical abortions should no longer require medical supervision. have not. “
Organizations of medical professionals and reproductive health groups, which sent a letter to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in March asking the FDA to lift the restrictions during the pandemic, welcomed the decision.
“Mifepristone itself has proven through clinical study and decades of use that it is a safe, effective medication,” the president and CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement. “The requirement that the medicine be dispensed in person and then taken elsewhere at the discretion of the patient is arbitrary and does nothing to enhance the safety of an already safe medicine.”