(The Center Square) – Planned Parenthood is challenging several North Carolina abortion laws in state court, including one that requires physicians to administer drugs for a chemical abortion.
Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective filed a motion last week in an ongoing lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction against a North Carolina law that prevents nurse practitioners, midwives and physician assistants from administering drugs for an abortion.
The 2020 lawsuit also takes aim at North Carolina laws that prohibit telemedicine abortions, require a 72-hour informed consent period before an abortion, require women receive informed consent before an abortion, and safety code required for abortion facilities. The case is scheduled for litigation in September 2023, The Carolina Journal reports.
Planned Parenthood contends the preliminary injunction is necessary to address an influx of out-of-state women seeking abortions in North Carolina following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that repealed precedent in Roe v. Wade this summer.
“Permitting (Advanced Practice Clinicians) to provide these medications for abortion – which they already do for their patients in other contexts and which is within their scope of practice – would immediately increase access to abortion for North Carolinians and help alleviate the exacerbated post-Dobbs burdens on their access to reproductive health care,” according to the motion.
The two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol is approved by the Federal Drug Administration for abortions up to 10 weeks. The motion notes that North Carolina’s APCs are legally authorized to provide the same medications for miscarriage management.
North Carolina is among 29 states that require a physician to provide a procedural or medication abortion, while three states limit procedural abortions to physicians while allowing clinicians to administer the abortion pills, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion advocacy group.
North Carolina Right to Life President Bill Pincus told Reuters that advanced practice clinicians may not have the proper knowledge to provide abortions.
“Planned Parenthood is using the judiciary to circumvent laws passed by the North Carolina General Assembly,” he wrote in a statement.
Nurse practitioner Anne Logan Bass, a Planned Parenthood employee working in Virginia and North Carolina, told the news wire wait times for appointments at the nonprofit’s abortion clinics in Asheville and Winston-Salem are now at three weeks.
Bass, who can legally provide abortion pills in Virginia but not North Carolina, contends the injunction would speed up the timeline, and allow more women to abort their children with the help of APCs.
“We could immediately start to increase access in North Carolina, because we have all of these advanced practice clinicians – nurse midwives, nurse practitioners – and they’re super qualified and ready and able,” she said.
A fact sheet from the Charlotte Lozier Institute reports that chemical abortions result in a complication rate four times that of surgical abortions, with one out of five women suffering complications. The nonprofit notes that the rate of chemical abortion-related emergency room visits increased over 500% between 2022 and 2015.