Legal Medical Abortions Are Up in US, But So Are DIY Pills from Mexico John Burnett - National Public Radio
go to original June 9, 2016

Women who want an abortion in deeply conservative Texas have slightly more choice these days than they had a few months ago. In March, the Food and Drug Administration simplified rules on abortion medication, allowing patients to take the standard regimen of abortion drugs later in a pregnancy.

However, the recent spike in the number of women choosing legal, non-surgical abortions in U.S. clinics has not slowed brisk sales of abortion drugs south of the border, in Mexican pharmacies. One of the two medications in the regimen – misoprostol – is easy to get without a prescription in Mexico and significantly less expensive there.

More and more young women from Texas are walking across the international bridge for risky, do-it-yourself medical abortions with misoprostol that lack the second drug, mifepristone, and also lack the guidance and supervision by a doctor that the women would get in the U.S.

A surgical abortion ends an undesired pregnancy by removing the fetus and placenta from the woman’s uterus. A medical abortion in the U.S. is usually prescribed as a combination of mifepristone (Mifeprex) and misoprostol that, when taken in a two-step process over 48 hours or so, stops a pregnancy from developing and induces a miscarriage. (These drugs are not to be confused with the emergency contraception often called the morning-after pill or Plan B.)

The two-drug combination, when taken in this way, has a 95 percent success rate, studies show.

Read the rest at NEPR.net

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