UNDATED – A Minnesota doctor who helps procure mail-order medication abortions for South Dakota women said she plans to continue that practice even if the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws or limits the use of mifepristone, one of the pills used in the process.
“It’s business as usual,” said Dr. Julie Amaon, medical director of Just the Pill.
The Twin Cities telemedicine provider assisted more than 150 South Dakota residents in 2022 and 2023 with online consultations and prescriptions to terminate pregnancies. The organization has provided service to more than 5,000 patients overall since starting as a nonprofit in 2020.
Amaon told News Watch that her “neck is sore from the whiplash” of legal wranglings that have intensified the abortion debate since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022 to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, allowing states to determine legality and access of reproductive services.
The new battleground focuses on medication abortion, which currently accounts for 54% of abortions in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health organization.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Texas-based Trump appointee, issued a ruling April 7 that threatened to halt the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of abortion pill mifepristone, first approved in 2000.
Less than a week later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals paused the mifepristone suspension but upheld Kacsmaryk’s rollback of more recent FDA policies that made abortion pills easier to obtain by removing the requirement of in-person provider visits.
On April 21, the Supreme Court issued a stay on that 5th Circuit ruling, reverting abortion access to post-Dobbs status while the appeals process continues, with a decision expected sometime in 2024 on the status of mifepristone and how medication abortion is administered.
Amaon, whose group aims to provide abortion access to women who reside in states with strict prohibitions, said Just the Pill will forge ahead no matter what the Supreme Court decides.
That could mean employing a one-pill regimen to terminate pregnancies if mifepristone is outlawed or using a mobile clinic to dispense pills in person to women who cross the border from South Dakota if FDA regulations change.
“What bothers me most is that the courts and lawyers are deciding matters of general health care instead of physicians and their patients,” she said.
