It’s been an uphill battle for the abortion pill (a bit of a misnomer, as the procedure for a medication abortion actually consists of two pills—mifepristone and misoprostol—taken in succession). In April of 2023, a Trump-appointed Texas judge suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, with an appeals court eventually ruling that the drug could remain on the market with restrictions.
Now, in an encouraging sign for the future of abortion care in the US, CVS and Walgreens have announced that they will soon start dispensing mifepristone in states where abortion is still legal. (Among the states this new policy excludes are Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and nearly a dozen others, all of which have enacted total or near-total abortion bans.) While patients were previously forced to pick up mifepristone in person at a hospital or other medical establishment, a small number of Walgreens pharmacies in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania will this week be able to dispense the drug in person. (Misoprostol, which is used for a variety of medical purposes in addition to its role in medication abortion, is already available in most pharmacies by prescription.)
A statement issued by CVS on Friday noted that the pharmacy chain would start to fill mifepristone prescriptions in all of its Massachusetts and Rhode Island pharmacies in the “weeks ahead,” with further expansion to states where abortion is legal “on a rolling basis.” While expanding abortion coverage on the East and West Coasts does little to solve the ongoing public health crisis created by lack of access to reproductive care in the South, at least it’s a start that has the potential to remove some red tape and stigma from the experience of seeking an abortion.
