More Women Who Are Not Pregnant Are Ordering Abortion Pills Just in Case

The News

Tens of thousands of women who are not pregnant are ordering abortion pills just in case they might need them someday, especially in states where access is threatened, according to a study published on Tuesday.

Why It Matters

The practice, known as advance provision, is relatively new and has increased significantly since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the national right to abortion.

In the study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers evaluated data from Aid Access, a telehealth organization that has long provided abortion pills to women in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy and began offering the medication to women in the United States who weren’t pregnant in September 2021.

Before May 2022, when a draft of the Supreme Court decision was leaked, Aid Access had received about 6,000 advance provision requests, averaging 25 per day. Since then, it has received over 42,000 requests, averaging 118 per day, said Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study.

The biggest spikes in demand followed events that raised doubts about the future availability of abortion. Requests peaked in the weeks between the leak and the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022, and in April 2023 after a flurry of court rulings in a lawsuit by abortion opponents seeking to curtail mifepristone, a key abortion pill, a case now before the Supreme Court.

Rates of requests were highest in states where abortion bans were expected — even higher than in states that already had bans. Asked why they requested the pills, most women said to “ensure personal health and choice” and “prepare for possible abortion restrictions,” according to the study.

“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. Aiken said.