(LifeSiteNews) — The vast majority of the so-called “telehealth” abortion business assists residents of pro-life states break laws protecting preborn babies from abortion, according to a new paper.
Medpage Today reports that the study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), examines data from 118,338 chemical abortion pill packs dispensed over a 15-month span (the beginning of July 2023 to the end of September 2024) by the pro-abortion group Aid Access (whose founder Rebecca Gomperts was one of the study’s co-authors).
It found that 84 percent of those packs were sent to states that do not allow abortion pills to be prescribed without seeing a doctor in-person.
“One plausible contributor [to abortions remaining high despite pro-life laws] is the rise of online asynchronous telemedicine abortion services — particularly those operating under shield laws, which allow U.S.-licensed clinicians to provide abortion medications to patients in ban states with protection from legal liability,” the authors theorized.
READ: 16 Republican AGs ask Congress to crack down on ‘shield laws’ protecting abortionists
Aid Access says its purpose is to supply abortion pills to women who do not “have the possibility of accessing local abortion services.”
But while the study indicates it is successful at its stated mission, the lack of oversight comes at a cost above and beyond the death of preborn babies – this week LifeSiteNews covered one case of a woman suing Aid Access for providing the father of her child abortion pills that he fed her without her knowledge by dissolving them into her drink.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines has become arguably the abortion lobby’s most effective tactic for preserving abortion “access.”
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.” A recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear “safer” than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.
