Celebrating mifepristone, a hero in modern abortion access, on its 25th anniversary in the U.S.

Though it faces new legal challenges, mifepristone may offer yet more

By Elisa Wells
Sept. 28, 2025

When the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, the abortion pill, on Sept. 28, 2000, none of us working on expanding access to reproductive health care could have imagined the future we find ourselves in 25 years later. From the fall of Roe in 2022 and the subsequent banning or restriction of abortion in 19 states, to South Carolina’s recent efforts to include some forms of birth control in its total abortion ban, access to the basic medical care and medications that allow us to control our reproductive destinies is hanging by a thread. In the midst of this reproductive health care apocalypse, mifepristone is proving itself to be a hero in the fight for abortion access.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2025/09/28/mifepristone-abortion-pill-fda-approval-25th-anniversary/

The New War on Drugs

Criminalization of abortion medication turns women’s bodies into crime scenes

Karen Thompson (Director of Litigation at Pregnancy Justice)
Aug 21, 2024

Earlier this year Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law SB 276, a first-of-its-kind legislation classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. The drugs, commonly used to perform medication abortions, are responsible for 63% of abortions in the US. As a result of this new law, mere possession of mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription in Louisiana can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”

We know what happens now: The outcome of this new layer of criminalization is entirely foreseeable. By putting the pills on a drug registry with special access rules, providers are no longer able to easily prescribe the pills and the ability of OB/GYNs to nimbly provide needed—and even emergency—health care if a woman is miscarrying is chilled. In Louisiana’s telling, mife and miso are the new heroin and medication abortion care puts pregnant people’s lives in jeopardy, not their own dangerous law. The lack of situational awareness around the law would be comical if the inevitable devastation of its effects wasn’t so horrifying.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/mifepristone-misoprostol-war-on-drugs

21.08.2024

abortion pills

drug testing of pregnant women

drug use and pregnancy

prosecuting women for abortion

SB 276

war on abortion drugs

Latin America’s Progress on Abortion Rights Is Under Attack

Constance Malleret
Aug 14, 2024

In July, demonstrators sporting the green bandannas of Latin America’s pro-choice movement filled the streets of Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, to protest against a new penal code under consideration by Congress. If passed, the code would keep in place the Dominican Republic’s total ban on abortion, despite decades of campaigning by women’s rights activists to include “las tres causales”—or three exceptions—to allow women to terminate their pregnancies in cases of rape or incest, if the mother’s life is at risk or if the pregnancy is nonviable.

They came close to succeeding in 2014, when then-President Danilo Medina approved a new penal code that would have decriminalized abortion in those three situations. But just before the changes came into force, they were blocked on constitutional grounds by the Supreme Court, leaving the current code, which dates from 1884, in place. The country’s incumbent president, Luis Abinader—who starts serving his second consecutive term this month—made the approval of “las tres causales” a pillar of his 2020 election campaign, only to disappoint the abortion rights movement by letting the issue fall by the wayside after taking office.

Continued: https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/latin-america-abortion-rights/

Criminalizing Drugs—Including Misoprostol and Mifepristone—Is a Bad Idea

Even before Louisiana’s decision to label abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances, the parallels and connections between the war on drugs and the war on abortion have been clear.

June 7, 2024
by LYNN M. PALTROW

Louisiana recently added misoprostol and mifepristone (“M&M”) to the state’s list of criminalized controlled substances. M&M are medications that, among other things, can safely and effectively end a pregnancy. As a result of this law, possession of these medications without a prescription can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”

Much of the outcry against this state action has focused on the fact that M&M are neither dangerous nor addictive and thus should not be categorized or criminalized as a controlled substance. While it is true that M&M, two exceptionally well-studied and approved medications, are extremely safe and lack any potential for addiction, this critique reinforces dangerous myths about the war on drugs already deeply intertwined with the war on abortion.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/06/07/war-on-drugs-misoprostol-mifepristone-abortion/

Bodily autonomy: Australian women still face obstacles when seeking abortion services

6 May 2024

In July last year, following a Senate inquiry into universal access to reproductive healthcare, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) removed restrictions on prescribing and dispensing the medical abortion pill MS-2 Step (mifepristone and misoprostol).

As a result, medical practitioners are no longer required to complete mandatory training and registration to provide this service. The lifting of restrictions means “MS-2 Step can now be prescribed by any healthcare practitioner with appropriate qualifications and training, without the need for certification”.

Continued: https://lens.monash.edu/@medicine-health/2024/05/06/1386674/bodily-autonomy-australian-women-still-face-obstacles-when-seeking-abortion-services

USA – Alone in a bathroom:

The fear and uncertainty of a post-Roe medication abortion

By Caroline Kitchener
April 11, 2024

Angel tucked two white pills into each side of her mouth, bracing herself as they began to dissolve. Her deepest fears and anxieties took over.

Angel had wanted to talk to a doctor before she took the pills to end her pregnancy, worried about how they might interact with medication she took for her heart condition. But in her home state of Oklahoma, where almost all abortions are banned, that wasn’t an option.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/abortion-pill-experience-stories/

USA – How the abortion pill case at the supreme court could undo the FDA

The medical industry watches with trepidation as mifepristone case could have huge consequences for drug regulation

Jessica Glenza in New York
Mon 25 Mar 2024

A supreme court case about one little pill – mifepristone – has the medical and pharmaceutical world on edge. … Despite a more than 20-year track record of safe real-world use, backed up by more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, a group of anti-abortion doctors is seeking to roll back US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions that changed and relaxed some prescribing rules.

If the doctors succeed, despite contested and in some cases now-retracted evidence of harm, the case could reshape abortion access in the US and have enormous and unpredictable consequences for how drugs are prescribed, regulated and developed.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/25/abortion-pill-case-fda

25.03.2024

Food and Drug Administration

Juan Hincapie-Castillo

The Disastrous Potential of the Texas Abortion-Pill Ruling

A nationwide ban on mifepristone would further erode doctors’ ability to provide—or learn how to provide—lifesaving care.

By Isaac Chotiner
April 11, 2023

Last week, two federal judges issued conflicting rulings on the abortion drug mifepristone, setting the stage for a clash that is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. First, a judge in Texas ruled that mifepristone would be banned nationwide in seven days. Then, a judge in Washington ordered the F.D.A. not to make any changes to the availability of the drug, which the agency approved for use more than two decades ago and which has an extensive safety record. While the legal process unfolds, abortion providers and health professionals are caught in limbo, exacerbating the challenges they have faced since last year’s Dobbs decision.

I recently spoke by phone with Jody Steinauer, the director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, to better understand how abortion care changed after Dobbs and what a ban on mifepristone would mean for women’s health care. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-disastrous-potential-of-the-texas-abortion-pill-ruling

11.04.2023

Interviews/Podcasts

Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Jody Steinauer

mifepristone

miscarriage management

misoprostol-only abortions

U.S.: This New Site Aims to Make It Safer to Have an Abortion at Home

This New Site Aims to Make It Safer to Have an Abortion at Home
"If we truly believe in women’s self-determination, they should also have a choice in how."

By Jill Filipovic
Apr 27, 2017

No one knows exactly how many women in the United States induce their own abortions every year, but we do know that, despite abortion being legal, a number of women take matters into their own hands. In the United States, women self-managing their own abortions — whether because they can’t access or afford a legal abortion in a clinic, because of feelings of fear or shame, or because they simply prefer the privacy of ending a pregnancy themselves — have long relied on word of mouth, Google, or their own instincts to figure out what to do and whether something has gone wrong.

That’s what Women Help Women wants to change. The organization just launched a new website that offers personalized information for women seeking to end early pregnancies with misoprostol, an abortion-inducing medication.

Continued at source: Cosmopolitan: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a9560329/self-managed-home-abortion-pill/

27.04.2017