By Carrie Baker for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Roz Brown for Texas News Service reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration

Earlier this month, the pharmaceutical company GenBioPro announced the names of 18 brick-and-mortar pharmacies that are now dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone. They are the first pharmacies to publicly acknowledge doing so after the FDA in late 2021 finally loosened medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that blocked pharmacy distribution for decades.

"At GenBioPro, we firmly believe everyone has a right to access evidence-based health care and safe and effective medicines, and that includes medical abortion," said Evan Masingill, CEO of GenBioPro, which successfully obtained FDA approval in 2019 for the first generic mifepristone tablet.

The pharmacies listed on their website include independent community drugstores, university-affiliated outlets and compounders located in nine states, including in Arizona, California, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin and Texas. There are no chain pharmacies on the list, although CVS and Walgreens say they plan to dispense the medication soon.

"While it's hopeful to see some brick-and-mortar pharmacies on this list, the large pharmacy chains are notably absent," said Amy Merrill, co-director of Plan C, which provides information on at-home abortion with pills. "Chain pharmacies could play a major part in expanding access, both because of their numerous locations and because they're the only ones with the resources to stand up to bullying by extremist politicians and their supporters."

When the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, the agency blocked pharmacies from dispensing the medication, instead requiring doctors to give the medication directly to patients. In December of 2021, the FDA announced they would for the first time allow brick-and-mortar pharmacies to dispense mifepristone-if they were certified with the FDA. In the ensuing months, the FDA negotiated with pharmacy representatives, GenBioPro and Danco, maker of the brand name mifepristone, to develop a certification process.

Finally, in January of 2023, the FDA announced the new certification process for pharmacies to dispense mifepristone. CVS and Walgreens immediately announced they would apply for certification to dispense mifepristone.

In response, anti-abortion advocates staged boycotts at CVS and Walgreen pharmacies and 20 conservative state attorneys general threatened legal action against these companies if they dispensed mifepristone in their states. Then 23 attorneys general issued a statement supporting medication abortion at CVS and Walgreens stores.

CVS acknowledged their pharmacies were not currently dispensing mifepristone, but said they were working through the steps required for certification.

"Once certified, we plan to dispense mifepristone in states where legally permissible in the near future," Amy Thibault of CVS Pharmacy told Ms.

Walgreens will also soon dispense the medication. "We are in the last stages of finalizing certification, and once certified, we will dispense this medication consistent with federal and state laws," said Fraser Engerman, senior director of external relations at Walgreens.

In addition to listing pharmacies dispensing mifepristone, GenBioPro has updated their website to help prescribers, pharmacies and patients understand the new FDA rules on mifepristone and learn how to access abortion pills. The website has up-to-date information about how pharmacies can become certified to dispense mifepristone, and how medical professionals can become certified to prescribe mifepristone and dispense the medication directly to patients or through certified pharmacies. They also offer patient education and support resources in English and Spanish, with some resources available in additional languages, including Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Haitian and Russian.

"We will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that these ... changes benefit as many people as possible and work toward truly universal access," said GenBioPro, noting that not everyone will have equal access because some states restrict abortion.

In addition to brick-and-mortar pharmacies, there are several mail-order companies dispensing mifepristone, including Honeybee Health and American Mail Order Pharmacy.

While many people prefer to receive abortion pills privately by mail, others may want to pick up the medications in person either because:

• they do not have a reliable or confidential mailing address,


• they cannot wait for the medication to arrive by mail because they are experiencing a miscarriage or health-threatening pregnancy, or


• they live in a state with an early gestational ban.

Advocates expressed frustration at how long it's taken for pharmacies to begin dispensing mifepristone.


"Mifepristone is the only medication that's seemingly regulated in a cultural manner: Can you imagine any other safe, common and essential medication being withheld from people who need it, even when they live right down the street from a pharmacy, and even after it's received long-overdue approval to be there?" said Merrill.


While pharmacy access to abortion pills slowly expands, the anti-abortion movement is trying to remove mifepristone from the market.


In November of 2021, anti-abortion doctors and a dentist filed a lawsuit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, asking an anti-abortion federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, to reverse the FDA's approval of mifepristone.


In April, the judge ruled the FDA improperly approved mifepristone in 2000 and stayed the approval-a ruling put on hold by the Supreme Court until it issues a final ruling in the case. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed in part, but still sharply restricted access to mifepristone nationwide. The Justice Department has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.


"This is why Plan C is dedicated to researching and listing alternate routes of access on our website, so people know about their full range of options to get safe abortion pills in the US," said Merrill. The Plan C Guide to Pills provides information about how to obtain abortion pills in all 50 states, including through telemedicine, community support networks, and vetted websites selling abortion pills.


Meanwhile, if restrictions are put in place, clinicians are prepared to continue offering telehealth abortion with misoprostol alone.


"We all deserve better. And until our government, policymakers and industries can protect full rights and access, people will continue to need activist providers and community networks, and Plan C will continue to spread the word that these options exist," said Merrill.



Carrie Baker wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.



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Today marks the last day of Black Maternal Health Week, a nationally and internationally recognized observance that serves to build community collaboration around addressing the maternal health statistics for Black women.

Black women in the U.S. are more than three times more likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause than white women and are more than two times more likely to experience complications that negatively impact their health. The majority of them are preventable.

The weeklong campaign that serves to highlight these disparities was founded in 2018 by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. Its executive director, Angela Aina, said while there have been great strides since the launch, more attention needs to be paid to the root causes of maternal morbidity and mortality.

"It really does point to how pervasive and how systemic and structural gendered racism and obstetric violence is very, very much seeped in our systems," she explained.

The rate of adverse outcomes for Black women in Wisconsin have increased significantly in the past decade. Across the state, they are more than 1.5 times more likely to experience adverse outcomes, and more than twice as likely to experience a pregnancy-related death.

In 2023, the overall maternal mortality rate in the U.S. decreased while rates for Black women slightly increased. The outcomes also impact infant health, with babies born to Black, American Indian and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women experiencing an increased mortality rates than those born to white people.

Aina said while Black Maternal Health Week amplifies the lived experiences of Black women, it does not exclude others.

"We want to see a change for those most impacted, those most vulnerable, those most at risk of these issues and these challenges - and that when we address it, has a ripple and domino effect for everybody else," she insisted.

Aina said such structural issues as housing, economics and maternity-care 'deserts' all play a role, and emphasized the need to increase midwifery care, the number of birth centers, and funding to community-based organizations to positively affect Black maternal-health outcomes.

"To really understand and value the lives of Black people, and the lives of Black women in particular, the lives of us all," she explained, "and the fact that we are all deserving of quality, comprehensive maternal and reproductive health care."


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By Jade Prévost-Manuel for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Yes! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

Taylor Young has never wanted to be a mom. From the time the now 27-year-old began dating, she experienced persistent anxiety around the thought of getting pregnant in Ohio, a Republican-controlled state where Young felt her right to abortion was tenuous.

In 2018, she discovered the childfree subreddit, an online forum on Reddit for people who do not have children and do not want them. In that forum, she learned about bilateral salpingectomy, a procedure that removes both fallopian tubes and permanently prevents pregnancy.

"I was 19 or 20, and I knew I probably wouldn't be able to get it," says Young, who didn't meet the minimum age requirement to have a Medicaid-funded sterilization procedure at the time. "But it was something that was kind of in my back pocket."

In 2022, when a document suggesting the U.S. Supreme Court was likely going to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, Young, who now met the minimum age requirement, immediately made an appointment with her gynecologist for a bilateral salpingectomy.

After observing the mandatory one-month waiting period, Young received the procedure. "[I had felt like] an animal in a trap," she says. "But when I woke up from that surgery, it was just ... indescribable peace."

Young is one of many people of reproductive age whose health care decisions have been influenced by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the fundamental ruling protecting the right to abortion in the United States.

In the years since, the rate of permanent sterilization procedures for people between 18 and 30 has jumped, particularly among female-born people. During the 2024 election, abortion rights were a key ballot issue and several states, including Maryland and Colorado, enshrined the right to abortion into their state constitutions.

Political promises to legalize abortion-a critical issue, but one topic in the much larger ecosystem of reproductive health care-have overlooked some of the discussions the country must have to improve reproductive rights for the millions of reproducing people in America. When we take a closer look at the quality of reproductive health care that most people receive, it's clear that simply restoring Roe v. Wade isn't enough.

"The populations with the best reproductive health care outcomes ... have all of [their] basic and human life needs met," says Dr. Regina Davis Moss, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, a group that amplifies Black voices to advocate for reproductive equity. "That is why we have some of the worst outcomes when we compare ourselves to other industrialized countries."

Pregnant people in the United States are more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum than any other high-income nation, even though more than 80% of maternal deaths are preventable. The maternal death rate is double for Black women, who statistically are less likely to have access to high-quality medical care. On average, giving birth in the U.S. can cost more than $18,500.

Cost is a leading prohibitive factor for those who most need to access birth control, abortion, and other reproductive health care. But there are legal barriers to subsidizing reproductive health care services-such as the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion with few exceptions-and in many counties, no one to provide them. An estimated one-third of American counties, for example, do not have a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician to deliver maternal care.

So, what might reproductive health care look like in a reimagined America that puts equity first? There's already a framework for it: reproductive justice, a critical feminist framework that advocates for the right to have children, the right not to have them, and the right to raise children in a safe environment.

A Quest for Overall Well-Being

In 1994, a group of Black women activists coined the term "reproductive justice" to achieve, as Loretta J. Ross writes, "the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women's human rights."

While reproductive justice promotes equitable reproductive health care for everyone, the idea was born out of the struggles that people of color-particularly Black women-have faced in the United States since slavery, when they were forced to bear children to work on plantations.

The framework acknowledges that Black women face poorer reproductive health outcomes-and aims to do something about it. "The reproductive justice framework analyzes how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community-and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access," Ross writes. "Reproductive justice addresses the social reality of inequality-specifically, the inequality of opportunities that we have to control our reproductive destiny."

There is a modern-day implicit bias in health care, says Davis Moss, that women as a whole can't be trusted to make their own decisions about their bodies. For example, Black women commonly report that health care providers are not offering them the full range of contraceptive options.

"The subjugation, the control, all that has happened ever since the country was born," says Davis Moss. "We've seen that happen over the years in our health care system, in segregated hospitals, all the way up to modern day in clinical care encounters."

Though Young's bilateral salpingectomy, which can cost thousands of dollars without insurance, was fully covered by Ohio Medicaid, cost remains a prohibitive factor for many people accessing reproductive health care in the United States.

Take contraception, for example. A 2022 KFF Women's Health Survey, which interviewed more than 5,000 female-born participants, looked at how cost influences contraceptive choice. Researchers found that a quarter of those surveyed with insurance had to pay at least part of their birth control costs out of pocket. "Any time you have to make a choice about day-to-day expenses and a copay... you know, living expenses, keeping food on the table... that is going to have an impact [on health]," says Davis Moss.

The survey also found that of those who were in their reproductive years, one in five women who were uninsured had to stop using a contraceptive method because they couldn't afford it. That data is supported by a Commonwealth Fund survey of women in several high-income nations, which found that women of reproductive age in the U.S. were the most likely to skip or delay necessary care due to cost.

Solutions for the Future

In 2023, In Our Own Voice and more than 50 other Black women's organizations published the Black Reproductive Policy Agenda, a playbook on how to improve reproductive justice for birthing people at the policy level.

The report makes more than a dozen policy recommendations that Davis Moss calls "proactive, comprehensive, and life-saving." Among them are making prescription birth control free, requiring states to provide maternity and newborn care for at least one year (the time frame in which most maternal deaths occur), and increasing access to doulas and midwives who advocate for patients.

Passing acts like the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance Act would require the federal government to provide funding for abortion services. "That in and of itself directly impacts a large percentage of Black women of child-bearing age [who] are on Medicaid and Medicare," says Davis Moss.

For people struggling to pay for contraception, with or without health insurance, the cost of an in-person abortion-the median price is $600-is somewhat unthinkable. Medication abortion, however, can be cheaper and more accessible. Such is the promise of telehealth abortion, a virtual way to connect with a doctor, receive a prescription, and take abortion pills in a supportive environment.

Increasingly more women in the United States are finding themselves living in maternity care and reproductive health care deserts-areas where there is limited or nonexistent access to prenatal, postnatal, maternity, contraceptive, or abortion services. Telemedicine can provide a range of services for people living in these areas at a fraction of the cost-the median price of a telehealth medication abortion is $150.

"Telehealth does a lot to remove barriers to access to health care," says Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at UC San Francisco who researches the impacts of telehealth abortion. "People who live in rural areas, young people, people who report facing food insecurity... in our research, they are the most likely to have said that telehealth enabled them to have an abortion."

But even with the advent of telehealth, both Upadhyay and Davis Moss say addressing racism is essential to establishing an equitable reproductive future. That's one of the reasons the Black Reproductive Policy Agenda recommends funding anti-Black racism programs as a part of its agenda.

"This is the reason those 12 Black women 30 years ago said 'You can't only focus on abortion,'" says Davis Moss. "It's impossible to have one without the other."

After getting a bilateral salpingectomy, Young feels relieved. Yet she still worries about what will happen with Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act-the resources she relies on to help her afford care for chronic health issues-under the Trump administration, and what that means for others seeking care.

"Thinking about if other women don't have access, that breaks my heart, and from the abortion side [...] it's too much to bear," she says, emotion tugging at her voice. "I feel relieved I got [the procedure] done when I did. I feel safe."


Jade Prévost-Manuel wrote this article for Yes! Media.


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With a few days left in the 2025 legislative session, Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill they say should reassure doctors they can rely on their medical judgment when treating pregnancy complications, despite the state's abortion ban.

But some Kentucky doctors said the wording of House Bill 90, in an effort to clarify the ban, is "junk language," which confuses them even more than current law.

Tamarra Weider, Kentucky state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, said dozens of health care providers have signed onto a letter asking Gov. Andy Beshear to veto it.

"I think it's also important to note that House Bill 90 changes the definition of medical emergency in Kentucky law," Weider pointed out. "The current law gives providers the authority to make decisions in emergencies but this bill would allow judges to decide whether care was truly necessary."

Some Kentucky OB/GYNs said the state's abortion ban is forcing them to violate their oath as physicians and causing "devastating consequences" for patients. Two House Republicans brought forth the language, which was supported largely along party lines. Supporters said the bill will help save lives.

Weider noted physicians accused of violating Kentucky's abortion ban can be charged with a Class D felony and imprisoned, if convicted.

"I think that this is going to continue to chill doctors, continue to chill hospitals, and their lawyers and administrators," Weider emphasized. "Because it puts forward more confusion, more ambiguity."

The legislation said, "no action that requires separating a pregnant woman from her unborn child shall be performed, except the following, when performed by a physician based upon his or her reasonable medical judgment." Doctors said the use of "reasonable medical judgment" still does not protect providers from legal action.

This story is based on original reporting by Sarah Ladd for the Kentucky Lantern.


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