Telehealth is increasingly an option for pregnant people seeking abortions in the United States — even those who live in states that have banned them. By the end of 2024, a quarter of the country’s abortions were provided via telehealth, with clinicians writing online prescriptions for mifepristone and misoprostol and mail-order pharmacies sending the medications to patients.
Studies have shown that the provision of medication abortion via telehealth services is both safe and effective at the same levels as in-person care, whether visits are performed in live video visits or text-based exchanges. But the future of such services is uncertain, as anti-abortion groups and some legislators are still seeking to restrict access.
On Monday in JAMA, researchers published a county-by-county breakdown of more than 118,000 online prescriptions from one of the largest telemedicine abortion providers, Aid Access, capturing the demographics of patients accessing medication abortion online. The study isn’t a complete look at telehealth abortion trends in the U.S. But it provides “a deeper view than what we’ve had before,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
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