Unregulated international abortion pill biz founder thinks abortion is ‘more accessible’ than ever

Aid Access, an international abortion pill business, is revamping its online abortion pill operation to ensure that doctors in states with “shield laws” can mail the drugs into states that restrict or prohibit abortion.

The business was founded by Dutch abortionist Rebecca Gomperts, who also co-founded Women on Web and Women on Waves. Glamour Magazine, which awarded Gomperts their “Woman of the Year” cover last year, wrote, “In 2005, after medication abortion came into use throughout Western Europe and won FDA approval in the United States, Gomperts seized on the radical potential of the pills mifepristone and misoprostol, and founded what The New York Times once termed ‘an online help desk’ called Women on Web to connect women to medical professionals who would prescribe and ship them for a reasonable fee.”

In 2018, Gomperts founded Aid Access to utilize telemedicine for abortion. Until recently, the group’s abortion pills were likely shipped into the United Stated through India without FDA approval. In March of 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a warning letter to AidAccess.org to cease shipments of the pills to the U.S.

A lawsuit filed in the case suggested at the time that the Aid Access abortion combipack was manufactured by a pharmaceuticals company marketed by DKT International. The warning letter failed to sway Gomperts, who has openly advised people to “lie to everybody” — and she continued to ship abortion drugs anyway.

In 2022, Glamour Magazine described the Aid Access process this way: “In states where medication abortion is legal, patients who use its website are referred to local doctors who prescribe the pills, which an online pharmacist fills. Costs max out at $150.”

“In states where abortion is illegal, the requests come into Gomperts herself. She writes the prescriptions, making use of her Austrian medical license. A distributor in India ships the medication into the United States. ‘I’m doing Texas and all the states where it’s banned,’ Gomperts adds, with evident pride,” added Glamour.

But… with the proliferation of so-called ‘shield laws‘ post-Dobbs (the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade) Gomperts is becoming even more emboldened.

The Washington Post recently spoke to Gomperts, and was told that the international online group “streamlined its process for mailing pills in mid-June.”

“No longer do all pills need to be shipped from India. Now, the organization has revamped its operation to let doctors in Democratic-led states with ‘shield laws’ — which aim to protect providers practicing in states where abortion is legal — mail abortion pills to states where the medication is banned,” the Washington Post wrote.

Aid Access Expanding Abortion

Gomperts is raising funds to conduct a clinical trial in the Republic of Moldova with the objective of “declar[ing] the abortion pill a contraceptive.” The goal of this move, she admits, is to blur the line between “contraception and what an abortion is,” as Live Action News previously reported.

In addition, Aid Access supplies so-called “advance provision” abortion pills to women who are not pregnant, and founder Rebecca Gomperts told Politico she hopes U.S. doctors will start to do likewise to evade abortion restrictions “by writing a prescription for perfectly lawful medications for someone who is not, in fact, pregnant.” All of this is entirely breaking FDA protocols.

Aid Access Impacting Abortions Post Dobbs

Unregulated and often uncounted abortion pills are flooding into the United States from businesses such as Aid Access with no response from law enforcement.

Illegal abortion pill syndicates continue to smuggle or disperse abortion drugs across the U.S. border from Mexico despite warnings from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that fake prescription pills from that region could “contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl.”

In July 2022, Gomperts claimed that after Texas restricted abortion, the international abortion pill group saw an 1100% increase in requests for abortion pills from the state, as Live Action News previously reported.  In addition, during November of 2022 (when #WeCount found that abortions decreased the most), a study published by JAMA Network claimed that Aid Access had “received 42,259 requests from 30 states” since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Then, a February of 2023 study noted, “With the proliferation of information-sharing on the Internet in particular, more people have been ordering medication abortion pills from online sources to end pregnancies on their own, a process referred to as self-managed medication abortion… In their first 2 years of operation, Aid Access received 57,506 requests for medication and demand for this service has surged as state-level abortion restrictions have been enacted.” [emphasis added]

“Through February, Aid Access was receiving an average of 254 requests a day from people in the United States, up from 83 requests from before the Dobbs decision,” the New York Times (NYT) recently reported.

A July 2023 article published by the Washington Post claimed that “Aid Access received almost 60 percent more requests for pills this spring than in the months immediately following Dobbs, fielding an average of 344 orders per day in April, in the wake of attempts to ban a key abortion drug nationwide.” However, in a May 2023 interview with CBS News Mornings, Gomperts claimed Aid Access was processing 1,500 requests per day.

Still, it is possible that some of these requests are due to panic buying and stockpiling because of the passage of pro-life laws in certain states. As the #WeCount researchers noted in their report about international online abortion pill sales, “it is unknown how many of these requests were… received, or how many were actually taken….”

Despite the way these groups flout the law, they are becoming emboldened. NYT recently pointed out that “[] enforcement remains rare. Over the years, the occasional Aid Access package has been confiscated by customs agents, but the service has remained largely untouched. Experts say a federal crackdown on patients ordering abortion pills — even those arriving from overseas — is unlikely.”

This lack of enforcement against Aid Access and other wholly unregulated online abortion pill distributors is likely what prompted Gomperts to acknowledge to the Washington Post that she “believes abortion is now more accessible than it was before Roe fell.”