Five Democrat-led states have begun to protect U.S. doctors who are sending abortion pills from an unregulated European company to U.S. states that have tried to outlaw those pills.
“Shield laws” passed in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont and Colorado over the past year provide legal protection to abortion providers who send abortion pills to Republican-led states where they are banned.
Aid Access, an Austrian nonprofit, announced last week that under this system, its abortion pills were prescribed by U.S. providers and sent to 3,500 women in states where abortion is banned. The group had previously used European doctors to prescribe abortion pills to American women with limited abortion access, but began in mid-June to use American doctors thanks to the “shield laws.”
The Washington Post spoke with a New York doctor who works with Aid Access to send abortion pills from blue states to red ones. The Post wrote the doctor’s family pingpong table was “covered with abortion pills bound for the South and Midwest.”
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“Everything I’m doing is completely legal,” claimed the doctor, who remained anonymous over safety concerns. “Texas might say I’m breaking their laws, but I don’t live in Texas.”
Aid Access was founded in 2018 to expand abortion pill access worldwide, regardless of the drug’s legal status. The group announced last week that it now provides access to abortion pills in all 50 U.S. states.
The FDA sent Aid Access a cease-and-desist letter in 2019, saying it “determined that you cause the introduction into interstate commerce of misbranded and unapproved new drugs” in violation of federal law. Aid Access responded with a lawsuit, and no further action was taken by the FDA.
Neither the FDA nor Aid Access immediately responded to a request for comment.
Abortion pills accounted for the majority of abortions for the first time in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, whose data does not include the unregulated abortion pill market provided by Aid Access and others.
This use has likely increased since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the enactment of abortion restrictions in Republican-led states. Aid Access reported a 1,000% increase in orders from Texas after the state’s abortion law went into effect.
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The abortion pills consist of two drugs. Pregnant women first take mifepristone, which requires a prescription and terminates a developing fetus up to 10 weeks’ gestation, then misoprostol, which stimulates the uterus to deliver the lifeless fetus.
The pills can be taken and the fetus delivered at home without supervision from a doctor. While not nearly as fatal as surgical abortions, the abortion drugs have up to four times the complication rate due to extreme bleeding, cramping or complications delivering the fetus.
