A new study highlights a staggering 85% increase in orders for self-administered abortion drugs for non-pregnant American women since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
The report, which analyzes telemedicine prescriptions for the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, first appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on January 2.
As with a similar November 2022 report, the data were provided by Aid Access, “an Austrian-based nonprofit organization that mails abortion pills directly to women throughout the United States.”
Aid Access is a private initiative of Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, one of the studies’s co-authors. The initiative offers “advance access” services, meaning its online physicians will prescribe chemical abortion drugs to women who are not yet with-child but anticipate becoming pregnant and wishing to abort a child.
A Post-Roe Reaction
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin examined orders placed by Aid Access employees over four time periods:
- prior to the Dobbs leak on May 2, 2022,
- prior to the Court’s final decision to overturn Roe on June 23, 2022,
- after the formal Dobbs ruling (June 24, 2022 through April 6, 2023),
- and the weeks following conflicting rulings on the FDA approval of mifepristone (April 7 – 30, 2023).
Before the Dobbs leak, Aid Access fielded an average of 25 requests daily for “advance provision” of mifepristone and misoprostol. After the leak, orders surged to nearly ten times that: Aid Access was intentionally providing 247 prescriptions daily to American women who weren’t pregnant.
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The new numbers are more dramatic than those indicated in the November 2022 study, when orders subsided slightly through the end of 2022. But as challenges to the FDA’s rushed approval of the chemical abortion regimen caught the public’s attention, the number again increased to 172 per day.
Vox reported similar numbers from the Society of Family Planning, which “found abortion via telemedicine ‘increased by 85 percent compared to the pre-Dobbs period, going from comprising 5 percent of all abortions to 9 percent.’”
Motivations
JAMA researchers asked customers why they ordered the drugs before becoming pregnant. Seventy-four percent said they wanted “to ensure personal health and choice,” while 73% wanted “to prepare for possible abortion restriction.”
Most orders came from or on behalf of “white, urban, and more affluent women.”
The lead author, Dr. Abigail Aiken, concluded in an interview with NPR that “people are really responding to the threat of reduced abortion access.”
Dr. Aiken received funding from the Society of Family Planning, the Kopcho Reproductive Freedom Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study.
‘Stockpiling’ Drug Dangers
As CatholicVote reported in October 2022, the FDA itself has expressed serious concerns about “stockpiling” mifepristone for future use. The FDA approved “telehealth” chemical abortion prescriptions in 2021.
“The FDA is concerned about the advance prescribing of mifepristone,” an FDA spokesperson told POLITICO at the time. “Mifepristone is not approved for advance provision of a medical abortion.”
Contrary to the popular narrative that chemical abortion is “safe and effective,” mifepristone carries significant risks of which most Americans are unaware – thanks in large part to the FDA’s own rushed approval of the so-called “medication.”
>> WATCH: LOOPcast Interview on the Risks of Chemical Abortion <<
While chemical abortion is almost always fatal to the child, the FDA has also reported 32 maternal deaths associated with mifepristone since its 2000 approval. These include “two cases of ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy located outside the womb, such as in the fallopian tubes) resulting in death” and “several fatal cases of severe systemic infection (also called sepsis).”
Stockpiling medications of any kind increases the likelihood that the consumer will end up taking those drugs unsupervised with harmful effects. With drugs intended not to restore the body’s natural processes (pregnancy) but to interrupt them (death of the child and induced labor), the risks to the consumer can only increase.
The Feds’ Failure to Protect Women and Children
There have been attempts to prevent remote prescriptions of mifepristone and misoprostol, but no legislation or executive interventions have so far been successful. As CatholicVote reported in 2022:
Under President Donald Trump, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to prevent Dr. Gomperts and Aid Access from shipping pills into the U.S., but the agency’s lawsuit was unsuccessful. According to court documents, Dr. Gomperts prescribed abortion drugs from overseas to over 7,000 American women in 2018 and 2019.
It is currently a crime to self-manage an abortion in three states — Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Nevada. Nineteen states have banned doctors from prescribing mifepristone remotely or via telehealth. It is also illegal in many states for Americans to import drugs from overseas for personal use.
Comstock laws make it illegal for the United States Postal Service (USPS) to send abortifacients or contraceptives, among other sex-related items, by mail. According to the New York Times, the Comstock laws carry the same restrictions for private carriers like UPS or FedEx.
But these laws are under attack in court, difficult to enforce by individual states, and rarely prosecuted.
Abusers’ ‘Dream Drug’
Such laws aim not only to protect unborn children, but also to prevent the weaponization of abortion against mothers.
In recent years, court cases have proliferated concerning abusive husbands, boyfriends, and pimps using telemedicine to obtain and secretly administer abortion-inducing drugs to pregnant women.
Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins recently called mifepristone “the abusers’ dream drug,” noting:
Women have had deadly abortion pills slipped into their tea, Starbucks, orange juice, yogurt, pancakes, sandwiches, and cereal. In another case, an abuser lied to his partner about what the life-ending drug was, saying it was an antibiotic.
Contraceptive or Abortifacient?
The abortion industry is already pushing chemical abortion as a form of contraception, which requires a complete redefinition of medical terms at the service of killing unborn children.
Dr. Gompers is spearheading a new effort to crowd-fund mifepristone, marketing it as a “contraceptive” rather than an abortion-inducing drug. Her organization, Women on Waves, recently began a large-scale clinical trial on nearly 1,000 women “to confirm its efficacy and safety.”
“After the trial,” Gompers said,
Mifepristone can be registered and distributed as a contraceptive. You could then use Mifepristone once a week to avoid getting pregnant. It also works as a morning-after pill or to end an early pregnancy. In this way, it challenges the very difference between contraception and abortion.
The Bottom Line
Eliminating basic biological distinctions between pregnancy, elective abortion, contraception, and miscarriage, while at the same time rubber-stamping the stockpiling of drugs designed to kill, is the height of medical malpractice. Gompers and Aid Access facilitate the reckless endangerment of women and the deaths of hundreds of infants on a daily basis while enabling abusers and traffickers in their criminal behaviors.
In our post-Roe reality, Americans across the political spectrum should be outraged and demand action from policymakers now more than ever. In 2024, we expect a ruling from the Supreme Court on the FDA and consumer access to mifepristone and misoprostol.
It’s a start. But lawfare is not enough.
American lawmakers must step forward and take back control of the abortion industry on behalf of American women and children. For example:
- Congress should prohibit telehealth orders for abortion drugs, both internationally and domestically
- Legislators at all levels of government should require informed parental consent for minor children and enact laws carrying severe penalties against forced abortion that reflect justice for both dead children and their mothers
- Policymakers should demand in-depth studies of the actual consumers of the abortion drug to identify abusers for prosecution
- The executive branch should constrain the FDA from approving drugs designed to interrupt natural physiological processes such as pregnancy and adolescence
These steps would go a long way in wresting control from extreme drug moguls like Dr. Gompers and restoring sanity to American healthcare.
