The FDA is being urged to let women receive abortion-inducing drugs through the mail amid the coronavirus rather than have to leave their homes to get them.
“While any woman who wants to go into a doctor’s office or into a clinic today and get an abortion should continue to be able to do so, control over one’s reproductive freedom should not be limited to those able to leave their homes as we battle the coronavirus,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Monday — echoing a letter sent by her and 20 other top law-enforcement officials to the FDA urging an easing-up of restrictions.
No woman should be “forced to risk her life while exercising her constitutional right to an abortion,” James said — as states around the country, including New York, are in various degrees of lockdown amid the deadly pandemic.
The AGs wrote a letter to the federal Department of Health & Human Services chief Alex Azar, as well as FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, demanding a loosening of what they call “onerous and medically unnecessary” current restrictions on women’s access to the abortion drug known as RU-486.
The prescription drug, called Mifpristone, involves women taking two medicines to bring about an abortion.
But to obtain it, women currently must get it at a doctor’s office, clinic or hospital while also signing a “patient agreement” saying they have been warned of risks associated with it.
The AGs said in their letter that women shouldn’t have to leave home amid the virus to get the drugs. Using “telehealth” — or going through the approval and prescription process with a health professional by phone or computer and then being mailed the drugs — should be enough, they said.
The authorities said time is of the essence, particularly considering that politicians in some states, including Texas and Ohio, are now claiming that abortions fall under “nonessential” healthcare and would take a back seat to other medical issues.
The FDA, which is an agency of HHS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.