New Delhi: The fight over reproductive rights in the United States is poised to shift to a new battleground: abortion-inducing pills, Agence France-Presse reported. This comes as conservative US states rush to enact abortion bans following the Supreme Court’s decision.
US President Joe Biden’s administration will now focus on expanding access to abortion pills for the women living in states where the procedure is banned or restricted.
The US President had earlier on Friday ordered health officials to make sure the abortion pills were available to the American women.
“I will do all in my power to protect a woman’s right in states where they will face the consequences of today’s decision,” Agence France-Presse quoted the President as saying in his televised address to the nation.
This came after the High Court shredded 50 years of constitutional protections for abortion rights.
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The pills, which can be used to terminate a pregnancy up to 10 weeks’ gestation, already account for half of all abortions carried out in the country.
Earlier on Saturday, some activists rallying outside the Supreme Court in Washington held up posters with instructions on where women can get abortion pills, while others chanted “My body, my choice.”
Expressing confidence that the situation now faced by the American women is not as tragic as it was 50 years ago before the landmark Roe vs. Wade ruling of 1973 that enshrined abortion rights in the United States, Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts said “the abortion pills cannot be stopped”.
“So there is always access to a safe abortion if a woman has an unwanted pregnancy,” Gomperts, who runs an Austria-based organization Aid Access that provides abortion pills over the internet, told AFP in a phone interview.
America’s health regulator — the Food and Drug Administration — approved the use of abortion pills two decades ago.
Earlier last year, the Food and Drug Administration allowed for them to be prescribed via telemedicine and delivered by mail.