Accepting sloppy safety studies and giving in to abortion industry demands to loosen restrictions on mifepristone, President Biden’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made a crucial decision. In 2023, the FDA fully authorized telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills with no required in-person visits.*
This week, new research from a team led by Dima Mazen Qato of the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The message is that this seemingly small change touched off a huge increase in sales of mifepristone, the “abortion pill”.
“Changes in Mifepristone Use at Pharmacies After Removal of the FDA In-Person Dispensing Requirement,” was published in the April 13, 2026, online edition of JAMA. According to the study, following the change, the number of women getting abortion pills from pharmacies soared from about 17.9 to 2,730.5 a month.
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This is not doubling or tripling the number of abortion pills coming from pharmacies. It is an increase of more than a factor of 150!
The term “pharmacies” is a bit misleading, though. While there were some retail pharmacies that began dispensing mifepristone, most of this growth came from online or mail order “pharmacies” providing drugs these through “telehealth.”
Perhaps bowing to pressure from customers who did not want them involved in selling abortion pills, researchers say retail pharmacies (not named directly, but including entities such as CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, or major super stores), actually saw very little growth. The four authors say about 1.2 individuals picked up their abortion pills at retail chains before the FDA policy change, but only about 3.1 a month after the in-person rule was dropped.
Independent pharmacies – locally owned individual operations – showed a bit more growth, going from 0.3 customers a month to 58.7 after the change.
But the major growth came from “Mail Order” pharmacies. (The authors do not specify, but this would presumably include online sellers like HoneyBee Health, Aid Access, Just the Pill, etc.) They did a fair amount of business before the official FDA policy revision (owing to the broad allowance Biden’s FDA made in 2021?), providing abortion pills to 16.4 individuals a month. After the 2023 formal change dropped the in-person visit, that figure skyrocketed to 2,668.7 per month!
Clearly, these online pharmacies are the driving force behind the exploding abortion pill sales, and this is directly attributable to this policy change put in place by Biden’s FDA.
Abortion pill defenders like to say that this change was motivated by the “science.” But, in fact, these changes were not fully studied before the FDA dropped the in-person requirement, and real world reports since then have shown increased complications associated with this protocol change. (See here.)
For all of its statistical insights, this research appears to offer very little useful data on the numbers of pills shipped to states where abortions, by surgery or pills, was limited or illegal after the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe. The data set used by authors says there was a minimal or non-existent number of pills distributed in those states, but other industry sources such as the Society of Family Planning We Count survey say that thousands of pills were mailed to such states each month.
This is not a refutation of the findings of this research, but an indication that the immediate spike in on-line, mail order, or telehealth sales was likely even greater than what these authors found. The Biden administration’s decision to drop the required in-person visit and allow these pills to be sold online was probably responsible for an explosion in use across the board, not just in abortion friendly states.
Though it would be wonderful if laws in pro-life states kept online abortion pill merchants from shipping their wares to women in those states, groups like Aid Access have shown little regard for those laws. Emboldened by constitutionally suspect “shield laws” from pro-abortion states supposedly protecting them from prosecution, they have advertised and sold abortion pills to women in those states anyway.
With that in mind, and with data from other sources confirming heavy sales to states where these abortions are supposed to be illegal, it seems more likely than not that the surge in abortion friendly states was matched or surpassed by sales where women saw travel or these new contactless mail-order pills as their way around state limits.
So, while the JAMA article research may not give us the full picture of this increase, it does show quite clearly that the Biden FDA’s 2023 deregulation of the drug unleashed a telehealth torrent of these dangerous pills
* Biden first announced this change in 2021, but the FDA did not formalize the reduced mifepristone regulations until January of 2023.
LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.
