P lanned Parenthood recently announced that it will start providing high-risk abortion drugs to women in Illinois via an app — without ever speaking with them. The app user needs only to “confirm that [she is] currently located in Illinois and answer a few health questions,” then provide payment information. Planned Parenthood’s app cannot properly screen a woman for a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, determine the gestational age of her unborn baby, or even confirm if the app user is a woman, let alone a pregnant woman. This development imperils women’s health and safety.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s label for abortion drugs warns that roughly one in 25 women end up in the emergency room after taking these high-risk drugs. It also contains a black-box warning that the drugs present “risks of serious complications,” including “fatal infections and bleeding.” It is no wonder that the FDA requires abortion drugs be “prescribed [only] to women for whom emergency care is available.”
Given these serious risks, the FDA initially required doctors to provide ongoing care to women who take these drugs, including in-person doctor visits to check for ectopic pregnancies, severe bleeding, and life-threatening infections.
But the FDA removed these safeguards. Now prescribers do not check women for life-threatening conditions, but instead leave women to perform their own chemical abortions alone — without ever having visited a doctor for necessary in-person exams.
In other words, the FDA’s current mail-order abortion-drug regime allows abortion providers to prescribe these high-risk drugs without ever having met with or examined a woman — before, during, or after taking abortion drugs. The newly announced abortion-by-app scheme represents the inevitable, dangerous outgrowth of the FDA’s actions that removed crucial safeguards for these high-risk drugs.
The FDA’s label expressly requires a prescriber to exclude a possible ectopic pregnancy before giving a woman the drugs. That cannot happen without an in-person office visit. Even the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agrees that an ultrasound is, at minimum, necessary to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy.
In fact, Planned Parenthood’s website cautions that an ectopic pregnancy “happens in 1-2% of pregnancies” and “can lead to death” if not treated properly. Planned Parenthood also admits that taking abortion drugs could lead to “very heavy bleeding or damage to [a woman’s] uterus” if she is “farther along in [her] pregnancy.”
A brief questionnaire on an app cannot replace an ultrasound or in-person examination.
What’s more, Planned Parenthood’s app increases the risks of coercion or abuse. The FDA’s decision to remove in-person dispensing already created conditions conducive to procuring abortions for women suffering from abuse or trafficking. The abortion-drug provider has no way of knowing whether an abuser or trafficker is in the same room with a woman having a telehealth visit on her phone or computer. Moreover, Planned Parenthood’s app removes all interpersonal interaction between the woman and the provider. The app user could be a trafficker, an ex-boyfriend, or anyone seeking to obtain abortion drugs to slip into an unsuspecting pregnant woman’s drink.
And a new study confirms that mifepristone is a high-risk drug. The study found that about one in 30 women ended up in the emergency room — but these women received an in-person ultrasound or examination before being mailed abortion drugs.
Studies evaluating the lack of in-person visits tell a much different story. For example, the FDA’s decision to remove in-person visits included a study that found a 330 percent increase in hospitalizations for mail-order abortion drugs, and other studies that showed at least a 50 percent increase in emergency-room and urgent-care visits. Needless to say, the FDA’s decision to remove the commonsense requirement of an in-person visit was not aimed at improving women’s health.
Planned Parenthood’s app announcement comes as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hold the FDA accountable for recklessly removing crucial safety standards for abortion drugs. Alliance Defending Freedom and its medical clients are challenging the FDA’s unlawful actions that have harmed the health and safety of women and girls across this country. Two courts have agreed that the FDA crossed the line. The Supreme Court should consider becoming the third and final one to do so — because women and girls deserve better.