Thousands of American women stocked up on abortion pills after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked in 2022, according to a new study published Tuesday by the JAMA Network.
Aid Access, a European nonprofit that delivers the abortion pill through the mail, started its service to the U.S. in September 2021 and averaged 25 requests in advance per day for the abortion pill, according to The New York Times. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center was leaked in May 2022, however, the study found that the number of requests skyrocketed to 118 per day.
Mifepristone, the first of two pills needed for a chemical abortion, has a shelf life of up to five years, while misoprostol, the second dose, can last anywhere from 18 to 24 months, according to the Times.
The requests for medicine in advance were most likely to be made from white women aged 30 or older, who were without children, according to the Times. Dr. Aiken said that this may be due to the fact that Aid Access requires advance provision requesters to pay $110 per request, while pregnant women can get their request for free or at a lower price if they are in need of financial help.
“People were obviously paying attention and seeing the threat of abortion access either going away or being reduced where they were and thinking, ‘I need to get prepared for that,’” Dr. Abigail Aiken, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study, told the Times.
Requests dropped back down to 89 per day nationally after the Dobbs ruling but jumped up again to 172 in April 2023 after several federal courts issued conflicting decisions on the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, according to The Associated Press. The Supreme Court announced in December that it was going to take on a caselaunched by multiple pro-life medical professionals, who claimed in a lawsuit that the FDA rushed its approval of the drug and ignored safety measures.
Additionally, the doctors argued in the lawsuit that women who take the pills face a risk of infections, fertility issues for women with specific blood types and a greater risk of needing surgery if something goes wrong. They also warned that many women reported significant declines in mental health after having a chemical abortion.
Aiken did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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