For American women who’ve wanted pills, though, there’s been one major problem: Women on Web wouldn’t ship to the United States. American women could (and have) instead searched online for abortion pills, but some of the medicines and pharmacies they found were less than reliable. But now, the Women on Web’s founder, a doctor named Rebecca Gomperts, has launched a new service that she says is just as safe as Women on Web, and it does ship to the United States. The cost is $95, but the website says it will try to help women who can’t pay.
Just like Women on Web, the new service, Aid Access, will screen women’s eligibility to take the pills—they should not be more than nine weeks pregnant—through an online process. (If the pills are taken later, they are less likely to work.) Gomperts will herself fill each woman’s prescription for misoprostol and mifepristone, which together are about 97 percent effective in causing an abortion within the first trimester and already account for a third of all abortions in the U.S. She then sends the prescriptions to an Indian pharmacy that she trusts, which ships the pills to women at her homes in the U.S.
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