Telehealth Abortion Is Perfectly Safe And Effective, Study Confirms
HuffPost
The findings stand in stark opposition to arguments from the anti-abortion movement.
A new peer-reviewed study published Thursday confirms what abortion rights advocates have long argued: Using a telehealth connection to terminate a pregnancy is as effective and safe as seeing a doctor in person.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, comes weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over a lower court ruling that rolled back access to mifepristone, one of the pills used in a medication abortion, including being able to obtain it via a telehealth visit and by mail.
Researchers found that of the 6,034 uses of telehealth-prescribed mifepristone they observed across 20 states, 99.8% of the abortions “were not followed by serious adverse events” and 97.7% of the medication abortions were successful at terminating pregnancy.
“Telehealth medication abortion is effective, safe and comparable to published rates of in-person medication abortion care,” the researchers concluded.
Mifepristone is the most common method of terminating a pregnancy and is approved for use up to 10 weeks into term. Up until recently, patients had to have a doctor prescribe it in person. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Food and Drug Administration temporarily allowed patients to get approval for the drug via calls or chat services with a provider and to obtain the pills by mail.