Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Aid Access" in English language version.
New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that in the first week after SB 8 went into effect, average daily requests from Texas increased by almost twelve-fold, or 1,180 percent—from 10.8 to 137.7 per day. In the following three months, requests remained higher than before, at 29.5 per month or 174 percent higher than before SB 8 went into effect. ... She [Gomperts] has served over 30,000 people in the U.S. since she began Aid Access four years ago.
In December, the FDA said it would permanently allow patients to receive the abortion pills by mail. ... A 2021 study on requests to Aid Access found that the distance from an abortion clinic and whether the person lived below the federal poverty level were the two main factors that drove pregnant women to seek abortion medication by mail, which is often much cheaper than in-office care.
In the lawsuit, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts says she believes federal officials have seized between three and 10 doses of abortion drugs she has prescribed through her organization, Aid Access, since March. It also says Gomperts believes the government has blocked Aid Access from receiving payments from some patients. Gomperts' attorney, Richard Hearn, said the goal of the lawsuit is to force the FDA to stop those actions and to prevent Gomperts or her patients from being prosecuted under federal law.
A medication abortion cannot be distinguished from a miscarriage, and traces of the pills cannot be discovered if they are taken orally, said Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who founded Aid Access. If a woman needs care after taking the pills, "we always tell people to say they had a miscarriage," she said. "It's exactly the same symptoms, and the treatment is exactly the same." A study of thousands of women in the United States who received abortion pills from a provider without an in-person visit during the pandemic found that the practice was safe.
Over 100 anti-choice members of the U.S. House of Representatives thanked the Trump administration in a letter last week for addressing the sale of overseas medication abortion pills and encouraged Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to continue limiting the import of the drugs. ... But major medical associations have argued that medication abortion is safe for home use and should be more widely available, and researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association in 2018 that the FDA limitations on medication abortion drugs are unnecessary.
Aid Access has faced one regulatory challenge, in 2019, when the FDA sent the group a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that its generic mifepristone drug represented a "misbranded and unapproved" drug that posed risk to consumers. (The FDA approved one brand of mifepristone, Mifeprex, in 2000, and in 2019 approved a generic version.) Aid Access, in turn, sued the FDA, alleging the agency was impeding Americans' constitutional right to an abortion and that its drugs were, in fact, approved. Aid Access also maintained that the FDA had no legal jurisdiction over Gomperts. The case was dismissed in part because the FDA never took action following its letter.
Aid Access, a nonprofit based in Europe that mails pills worldwide, even to states with abortion bans, said it is receiving about 4,000 requests for abortion pills a month from the U.S.
