A suit has been filed by the ACLU and Dr. Graham Cheliu, who practices on the island of Kauai, to make medication abortion more widely available. Kauai has no abortion clinics so if a patient wants to obtain an abortion they must fly 150 miles to another island. The FDA currently prevents one of the two drugs needs in a medication abortion, mifepristone, to be sold in pharmacies. Cheliu and the ACLU are suing to change that.
Rewire reports:
“Overwhelming medical evidence and decades of clinical experience show medication abortion to be a safe and effective method to end a pregnancy,” Dr. Paul Blumenthal, director of the Gynecology Service at Stanford University, said in a statement. “There is simply no medical justification for these restrictions, and they create a needless and harmful burden for women seeking this care.”
Should they be successful, this would be a dramatic change in guaranteeing women’s access to abortion across the nation.
