On Thursday, December 16, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made a move that will permanently expand access to medication abortions, colloquially also known as abortion pills. Snoop Dogg Is Now The Official Owner Of Death Row
For years, major medical organizations have been protesting to do away with the in-person requirement for abortion pills, arguing that the roadblocks to accessing are medically unnecessary and onerous for a drug shown to be low-risk, effective, and easy to use.
The announcement that they are removing the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, the first of two pills in a medication abortion regimen allowing the dispensing of mifepristone by mail via certified prescribers or pharmacies. Prior to the revision, the drug had to be picked up in person at a doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital.
The decision follows an FDA review on the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone. Those changes include “removing the requirement that mifepristone is dispensed only in certain healthcare settings allowing, prescriptions to be filled via certified mail-order or retail pharmacies.
Medication abortion, in which a pregnancy is ended in a two-pill process, has become a prevalent approach to terminating a pregnancy. Both political parties see this as the next frontier in the fight over abortion access, and awaits the Supreme Court decision on a Mississippi case where the justices are reexamining the precedent laid out by 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision.