United States : With Florida’s six- week revocation ban now in effect, correspondence- order revocation capsules and telehealth consultations with croakers from outside the state may come more pivotal in enabling women there to safely terminate their gravidity. Proponents on all sides of the revocation issue concur that legal challenges to the practice are likely to do as blue countries work to guard revocation providers and red countries defend their indigenous right to circumscribe revocation.
Shield Laws for Reproductive Health
According to Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, women can still schedule virtual visits for medication abortions with doctors in other states even though Florida law forbids telehealth appointments for abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
According to Rebouché, seven states have enacted “shield laws” to safeguard medical professionals who offer reproductive health care, regardless of the patient’s location: California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, and Washington. Some of those states’ providers work with patients all around the nation, even in areas where abortion is prohibited or restricted.
Aid Access Initiatives
According to founder and executive director Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, Aid Access already utilizes out-of-state physicians deliver send abortion tablets to 9,500 women in the United States each month, including up to 800 in Florida.
The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that promotes access to abortion, estimates that 63% of all pregnancy terminations in the United States in 2023 were medication abortions, which entail a combination of the medicines mifepristone and misoprostol.
Additionally, according to the Society of Family Planning, a research organization that supports both abortion rights and the right to an abortion, 16% of all medication abortions now involve virtual visits or online appointments, even though the Food and Drug Administration has only permitted the prescription of abortion pills through telehealth since 2020. Numbers provided by abortion providers form the basis of its data.
Insights from Guttmacher
Despite gestation termination being illegal in 14 countries and oppressively confined in five further, Rebouché said it’s possible that the convenience of telemedicine revocations has contributed to the recent rise in revocation rates. According to Guttmacher, there were over a million revocations in 2023 — the first full time following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which struck down the indigenous right to an revocation — a 10 rise from 2020 and a 12 increase from 2019.
The Rise of Online Appointments
Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, an OB-GYN and the founder of Three for Freedom, an online resource that teaches people how to obtain mail-order birth control, morning-after pills, and abortion pills, estimates that Florida women who travel out of state for an abortion will spend more than $2,000 on medical bills in addition to travel and child care costs.
Financial and Access Barriers
Approximately 1 in every 12 abortions nationwide were performed on 84,000 women in Florida last year. Out-of-state abortion doctors will find it difficult to service that many more patients, even with telehealth, she said.
“It is not realistic to assume that 84,000 patients can be seamlessly integrated into other clinics throughout the nation,” stated Lincoln. “Those who are unable to travel or obtain pills may have to give birth or turn to risky methods of ending their pregnancies.”