In the United States, a sharp increase in requests to send abortion pills from abroad

Since the US Supreme Court struck down the federal abortion law, requests from American women to have abortion pills mailed from abroad have risen sharply in the United States, according to a study released Tuesday.

This work, published in the scientific journal JAMA, analyzed the number of requests to the paid telemedicine service Aid Access, which prescribes and sends abortion pills from abroad to 30 American states.

It operates outside the American healthcare system, and was specifically designed to circumvent prohibitions or local access difficulties, by allowing women to abort alone at home.

Pill requests jump 160%

Beginning in late June, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, many states made abortion illegal or severely restricted it.

Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, Aid Access was receiving an average of 83 daily requests from those 30 states.

But in the two months since the decision was announced, that number jumped to 213 a day, according to the study, an increase of about 160%.

As a proportion of the female population in each state, the increase was greatest for applications from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Oklahoma.

These five states are among those that have completely banned abortions.

The “

were often mentioned by women using this service, in a questionnaire they had to fill out when they applied.

In states that have made abortions illegal, this answer was cited in about 62% of cases after the Supreme Court decision, compared to 31% before.

Read alsoIn the United States, the hunt to ban abortion is in full swing

This study also does not take into account other ways of accessing these pills, which are easy to find for a few hundred dollars on commercial websites, but without medical support.

Another study, also published Tuesday in the journal JAMA, looked at the travel time for American women to a clinic performing abortions.

This duration averaged 28 minutes before the Supreme Court's decision, and increased considerably, to 1 hour and 40 minutes, after.

But this national average hides strong local disparities.

In states that implemented a total ban on abortion or a limit to 6 weeks of pregnancy, the average increase in travel time was 4 hours, according to this study.

Lack of access to an abortion clinic is particularly a problem "

", the authors pointed out.

In the 100 days following the Supreme Court ruling, at least 66 clinics have stopped performing abortions, according to a report in early October from the Guttmacher Institute.