Abortion Pill Providers Experiment With Ways to Broaden Access

These new efforts, which test the legal boundaries, have sprung up since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and many states restricted abortion.

By Pam Belluck
Sept. 3, 2022

As bans and restrictions proliferate across the country, abortion pill providers are pushing the envelope of regulations and laws to meet the surging demand for medication abortion in post-Roe America.

Some are using physician discretion to prescribe pills to patients further along in pregnancy than the 10-week limit set by the Food and Drug Administration. Some are making pills available to women who are not pregnant but feel they could need them someday. Some are employing a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach, providing telemedicine consultations and prescriptions without verifying that patients are in states that permit abortion.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/health/abortion-pill-access-roe-v-wade.html

USA – Meet the Doctors Taking to the High Seas to Perform Abortions

They might be in murky legal water.

Maddie Bender
Updated Jul. 24, 2022

When states cracked down on gambling in the 20th century, Americans took their money offshore to casino boats in the Mississippi River and along the Pacific Coast. They reasoned that once a vessel was more than 12 nautical miles offshore, it would be outside of U.S. territorial waters—and therefore wouldn’t have to abide by gambling restrictions.

Inspired by these boats, one doctor is betting on these same legal loopholes to set up a floating health clinic in the Gulf of Mexico and offer comprehensive reproductive care, including surgical abortions. It’s not a completely new idea, and it’s not uncontroversial, either: Some wonder whether the idea is more of a performative gimmick than a feasible solution to reproductive care, and there are a slew of legal issues to take into account, too. But all agree that it is the kind of workaround that will proliferate in a post-Roe America.

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-doctors-taking-to-the-high-seas-to-perform-abortions

24.07.2022

International Maritime Group

If You Can’t Get an Abortion on Land, Can You Get One on a Boat?

A doctor explains her long-brewing plan to set up a floating clinic in the Gulf of Mexico.

BY CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI
JULY 14, 2022

In the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reproductive health clinics in states with abortion bans have been forced to curtail their services. This has been particularly acute in the South, where there will soon be no legal abortion services in a wide swath of the country.

Some patients are now forced to travel hundreds of miles for care. Someday soon, they may not have to. To serve patients on the Gulf Coast who may be closer to the water than an abortion clinic, Amy Autry, an OB-GYN and professor at the University of California San Francisco, is spearheading a project that would provide abortion services on a boat in federal waters a few miles off the coastline. The nonprofit is called PRROWESS, an acronym that stands for Protecting Reproductive Rights Of Women Endangered by State Statutes.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/07/abortion-care-boat-gulf-of-mexico.html

14.07.2022

Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes

What Ireland’s Past Can Tell Us About A Post-Roe America

By Monica Potts
JUN. 8, 2022

Before 2018, most women in the Republic of Ireland were able to get abortions only if they traveled to a clinic in England or Wales or had a self-managed abortion at home, but figuring out how to do either of those options was difficult.

Information on abortion was censored in the first years of the ban, which took effect in 19831. Certain books were prohibited, and even the Irish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine had blank pages instead of adverts for British clinics. Meanwhile, those who sought abortions faced isolation, stigma and limited help from medical professionals. And for the few who were able to overcome those barriers and somehow reach one of the feminist networks that could help with information, logistics and fundraising, they still might pay hundreds of pounds or more for the procedure, transportation, meals and a hotel.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-irelands-past-can-tell-us-about-a-post-roe-america/

USA – The Doctor Prescribing Abortions from Overseas

If Roe falls, then Rebecca Gomperts could become one of the most important medical figures in America.

By CHELSEA CONABOY
06/03/2022

Within a few weeks, if Roe v. Wade is overturned as expected, a Dutch doctor named Rebecca Gomperts may quickly become the most controversial abortion provider in America — even though she isn’t in America.

Gomperts and her organization, Aid Access, is already the only provider openly providing telehealth abortion in the 19 states that currently restrict access to such services; if you go the website of Plan C, a group providing information about abortion pills by mail, Aid Access is the sole provider listed for many of them.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/03/rebecca-gomperts-interview-abortion-00036742

Inside the Effort to Promote Abortion Pills For a Post-Roe America

BY ABIGAIL ABRAMS AND JAMIE DUCHARME
MAY 31, 2022

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as a leaked draft opinion suggests it may, abortion will likely be banned or severely restricted in about half of the United States. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the country will return to a world before 1973, when the landmark Supreme Court case enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.

Abortion pills, which can be ordered online and delivered by mail, have already fundamentally changed reproductive rights in America. The regimen of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, can in theory be safely taken anywhere, including in the privacy of people’s homes, eliminating the need to undergo a procedure, travel out of state, take time off work, or confront protestors outside of a clinic. In part because of this convenience, abortion pills—also known as medication abortion—are now the most common method of ending a pregnancy in the U.S.

https://time.com/6181162/abortion-pill-access-roe-v-wade/

31.05.2022

abortion pills by mail

Aid Access

Bixby Center for Global and Reproductive Health

Food and Drug Administration

Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline

nnovating Education in Reproductive Health

Physicians for Reproductive Health

Plan C

Repro Legal Helpline

Reproductive Health Education in Family Medicine

Roe v. Wade

self-managed abortion

social media and abortion

telemedicine abortion

Dutch doctor says group will keep sending abortion pills to US women

Issued on: 16/05/2022

Washington (AFP) – Rebecca Gomperts, a 55-year-old Dutch physician, has spent years fighting for women's access to abortion around the world.

Made famous by her "abortion boat," as recounted in the 2014 documentary "Vessel," she and her Women on Waves group have anchored the ship in international waters off the coasts of Poland, Spain, Mexico and other countries, offering medical abortions to women otherwise unable to obtain them.

Continued: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220516-dutch-doctor-says-group-will-keep-sending-abortion-pills-to-us-women

Medication Abortions Are Increasing: What They Are and Where Women Get Them

Most abortions overseas involve pills, and the method is used in about half of legal U.S. abortions. It also seems to be the future of illicit abortion.

By Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz
May 9, 2022

Taking pills to end a pregnancy accounts for a growing share of abortions in the United States, both legal and not. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade as expected, medication abortion will play a larger role, especially among women who lose access to abortion clinics.

What is medication abortion?
It’s a regimen of pills that women can take at home, a method increasingly used around the world.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/upshot/abortion-pills-medication-roe-v-wade.html

Washington doctor on leading edge of abortion rights turns to next frontier after Roe: Pills

May 8, 2022
By Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter

Several years ago, an abortion rights activist got in touch with Dr. Suzanne Poppema, a reproductive rights leader retired from her Seattle-area practice. As states were passing abortion restrictions, plans were in the works for an offshore internet service that would supply abortion pills to women who couldn’t get them at home.

Would Poppema get involved?

Continued: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washington-doctor-on-leading-edge-of-abortion-rights-turns-to-next-frontier-after-roe-pills/

The abortion provider that Republicans are struggling to stop

But Silicon Valley could.

By Rachel M. Cohen
May 7, 2022

In 2018, more than two decades after Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts first became an activist to deliver abortion pills around the world, she turned to the United States. For years she had dedicated her life to working in countries where the procedure was illegal, and was firm in her refusal to avoid the US, where safe, legalized access was still available. “I think this is a problem the US has to solve itself,” she explained in 2014.

But following the election of President Donald Trump, the desperate requests she received from Americans went up, and the cost barriers in the US were glaring.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/23056530/aid-access-abortion-roe-wade-pills-mifepristone