FDA lifts restrictions on mailing abortion pills during pandemic

Health providers will be permitted temporarily to mail abortion-inducing medications to patients without seeing them in person, the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday, reversing a Trump administration policy.

“By halting enforcement of the in-person dispensing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA is recognizing and responding to the available evidence—which has clearly and definitively demonstrated that the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone is unnecessary and restrictive,” said the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a medical organization representing roughly 90% of gynecologists and obstetricians in the United States.