“Biden’s pledge to “follow the science” when it comes to public health is under scrutiny as medical experts argue — citing new data gained during the pandemic — that administering the abortion drugs remotely is safe and effective.
Should the federal rules get rewritten, someone in, say, Arkansas, could have a video consultation with a doctor in Massachusetts or even the UK and then receive the pills by mail. Even if red states moved to ban their importation, enforcement would be nearly impossible.
“It takes the fight out of the clinic setting into individual people’s homes,” explained Alina Salganicoff, the Director of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “That becomes much more difficult to regulate and could potentially broaden access.”
Women’s health and advocacy groups stress, however, that the pills are not a panacea. For one, they can only be used safely in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy — a narrow time window during which many people are not yet aware that they are pregnant. Additionally, taking the pills in a state that has banned them could be legally perilous, discouraging people from seeking medical help if they have a complication.”
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“Medication abortion relies on two pills — misoprostol, which is lightly regulated, and mifepristone, which has been more tightly regulated by FDA since its introduction in the market decades ago.
Yetmifepristone “has very few risks at all,” argues Villavicencio. “It is more safe than over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and Tylenol. We know this medication can be safely administered via telemedicine because we’ve studied it.”
ACOG, along with the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups, has been lobbying the Biden administration and arguing in court that the federal rules for dispensing the pills should be loosened. Their push has been echoed on Capitol Hill, where Democratic lawmakers have urged Biden to allow telemedicine abortions both during the pandemic and beyond.
But the decision still presents a political quandary for Biden, who until recently was relatively conservative on abortion for a Democratic politician.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/20/abortion-pills-telemedicine-477234