• Posted January 15, 2025

Live Far From a Clinic? Telehealth Abortion Services Are on the Rise

Women who live far from an abortion clinic depend on telehealth and mail to obtain access to medication abortion, a new study says.

Each 100-mile increase in distance from an abortion provider increased telehealth requests for abortion pills by about 61%, researchers reported in a new study published Jan. 8 in the American Journal of Public Health.

“Basically, the farther the patients resided from an abortion facility, the more they were depending on the pills being mailed to them,” co-lead researcher Dr. Emily Godfrey, an OB/GYN and family doctor with the University of Washington, said in a news release.

The study occurred between 2020 and 2022, beginning at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the ability to get abortion pills via telehealth and the mail was new.

Researchers observed an "exponential growth” of patients opting to receive their pills that way, Godfrey said.

What's more, much of the data collected was prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, Godfrey added.

“With abortion now banned or highly restricted in 22 U.S. states, telehealth abortion services are necessary to maintain essential reproductive health services,” Godfrey and colleagues stated in their paper. 

For this study, researchers gathered medical data from Aid Access users in 21 states and Washington D.C. Aid Access is a nonprofit that works with doctors to provide patients across the country with FDA-approved abortion pills.

Specifically, researchers analyzed telehealth requests for abortion pills from more than 8,400 people.

Overall, telehealth medication abortion requests that did not require in-clinic testing jumped 15-fold during the study period, to more than 1,000 requests a month, researchers noted.

Data showed that people living in poorer counties had a higher likelihood of seeking medication abortion via telehealth compared to people in wealthier counties.

About half of the telehealth users (51%) said they chose this option because of its low cost, compared with an in-clinic visit, researchers found.

Most women who sought a medication abortion through telehealth were 20 to 29, did not have children, and were at less than 6 weeks’ gestation.

“I think it is remarkable that many using the mail and telehealth option were under six weeks of pregnancy duration,” co-lead researcher Anna Fiastro, a University of Washington researcher in family medicine, said in a news release.

This finding, Fiastro added, reflects that this type of access to abortion pills is quick, cost-effective and safe. 

Today, licensed U.S. doctors are fulfilling close to 10,000 requests for medication abortion per month in states with abortion bans or restrictions, the researchers said in their paper.

Maintaining access to abortion medication is a “critically necessary healthcare service,” the authors concluded, “especially for individuals who are young, socially vulnerable and live in counties far from abortion facilities.”

More information

The Guttmacher Institute has more on state abortion bans.

SOURCE: University of Washington, news release, Jan. 9, 2025