A study of telemedicine providers in the U.S. that provide free abortion pills: A case study of the JAMA experiment at the University of Texas at Austin

“We see what we see elsewhere in the world in the U.S. — that when anti-abortion laws go into effect, oftentimes outside of the formal health care setting is where people look, and the locus of care gets shifted,” said Dr. Abigail Aiken, who is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the JAMA study.

The telemedicine organizations in the study evaluated prospective patients using written medical questionnaires, issued prescriptions from doctors who were typically in Europe and had pills shipped from pharmacies in India, generally charging about $100. Community networks typically asked for some information about the pregnancy and either delivered or mailed pills with detailed instructions, often for free.

Few online vendors asked women’s medical history and shipped the pills with the least detailed instructions, despite costing a small portion of the study. Vendors in the study were vetted by Plan C and found to be providing genuine abortion pills, Dr. Aiken said.

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Defending Freedom vs FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine: a case study on the FDA approval of mifepristone

There have been a lot of legal disputes in lower courts. The Supreme Court will be hearing two cases consolidated together, including FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which a coalition of antiabortion activists filed a suit challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, asking for it to be removed from the market. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian law firm that often takes politically charged cases.

The fight is about the pill that blocks the hormones needed for pregnant women, mifepristone. The drug has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for more than two decades and is used to treat patients who have Cushing’s syndrome. But its primary use is the one contested now—mifepristone is the first of two pills taken in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy for a standard medication abortion, along with the drug misoprostol.