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The landmark Supreme Court ruling that abolished abortion rights in the United States has created a situation of tremendous confusion, uncertainty and concern among American women. Many expressed fears that the ruling would put their sexual and reproductive health at risk and that even more restrictive measures could be introduced in the future, further limiting their freedom of self-determination. For this reason, writes The New York Times, there has been a trend among US women to accumulate birth control pills, emergency contraception pills and abortion pills.
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The Supreme Court ruling is not about contraception, which remains legal throughout the United States; although, as the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health organization, explains, several states allow physicians and pharmacists to refuse to prescribe or dispense contraceptives.
However, many believe that the new laws introduced by individual states can be interpreted even more restrictively or introduce restrictions in this sense. In fact, the Supreme Court’s reasoning, written by Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, states that in the future the Court should itself “reconsider” the judicial process of some important judgments governing relationships between persons of the same sex, same-sex marriage, and also Prevention.
For example, the Oklahoma law passed last May specifically prohibits abortions from the point of conception, and there are concerns that it could be interpreted even more restrictively in the future to limit or ban intrauterine contraceptives. i.e. the spirals).
These devices are commonly used as pre-intercourse contraceptive methods, but they can also be used as emergency contraceptives, ie, after intercourse. In the latter case, they can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. Although they are contraceptive methods, some anti-abortionists compare them to methods of voluntary termination of pregnancy, when in fact they have very different mechanisms of action.
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The New York Times writes that Planned Parenthood, a network of clinics that also deals with abortion, has received far more calls than usual in Atlanta in the past few days from people concerned about the available options for treating pregnancy or Abortion: “They want to know how many birth control pills they can accumulate,” said a spokesman, adding that some questions now include emergency contraception and vasectomy and tubal ligation.
Kiki Freedman, CEO of a startup that offers telemedicine abortions in six states, said demand doubled after the court’s decision and traffic to her website increased tenfold. Speaking to The New York Times, Abigail Carroll, founder of Abortion Access Nashville, an organization fighting for abortion rights in Tennessee, instead appealed to US women to be careful not to ban such devices from their pharmacy shelves who need it right now.
This trend of accumulation of birth control and abortion pills obviously affects only women who have the necessary financial means and can afford to buy drugs and contraceptives in bulk, while many others are excluded. The same discrepancy will also affect all those women who, in the coming days and months, want to move to a state other than the one in which they live for an abortion: in many cases, they will have to travel hundreds of kilometers to reach one State where abortion is legal and faces high costs for travel and accommodation.
The Supreme Court ruling could also have implications for medical abortion practiced in telemedicine, or abortion that occurs with the prescription of medication following a remote medical consultation. Among other things, it is the method by which more than half of abortions in the United States are performed.
In December 2021, the Food and Drug Administration, the US federal agency that deals with medicines, lifted a restriction requiring people to receive medicines in person and from certified healthcare professionals, making it possible to receive medicines in the mail and obtainable through telemedicine. However, contrary to the FDA, restrictive and now perfectly legitimate abortion laws in 19 states banned telemedicine, imposed other restrictions on the marketing of abortion drugs, and imposed tighter restrictions on their use.
Pharmacological practice for telemedicine could become a strategy to protect abortion rights. The Washington Post speculates that an underground market for abortion pills will now expand by arranging elusive shipping: the pills could be shipped from the supplier to an address in an abortion-friendly state, and then shipped back through friends, relatives, or various women’s support networks, living in an anti-abortion state.
These practices could expose everyone involved in the supply chain to lawsuits, investigations and possible prosecutions. But complaints from providers directly against states could also multiply, as restrictions on pharmacological abortion for telemedicine could violate guidelines from the FDA, a federal agency and as such higher than state agencies.
The court’s decision, the New York Times concluded, finally appears to be spurring interest in long-lasting reversible birth control methods like intrauterine devices. A similar phenomenon also occurred after the election of Donald Trump. A 2019 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that one of the reasons for this increase may be a concern that self-determination is being challenged. During his campaign, Trump promised to limit federal funding to abortion organizations.
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