US women are stocking up on abortion pills, especially when there is news about restrictions
Medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who weren’t pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use.
Aid Access received about 48,400 requests from across the U.S. for so-called “advance provision” from September 2021 through April 2023. Requests were highest right after news leaked in May 2022 that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade — but before the formal announcement that June, researchers found.
Nationally, the average number of daily requests shot up nearly tenfold, from about 25 in the eight months before the leak to 247 after the leak. In states where an abortion ban was inevitable, the average weekly request rate rose nearly ninefold.
This makes me worried about shelf life. Medication expires, but it's not like food where you can give it a whiff to assess if it's still good. It'll look, feel, and taste the same; it'll just slowly start losing its potency. Someone who needs it might take it as instructed on the bottle, but only actually be receiving a quarter dose or something. I'd guess there's threshold in which a dose isn't strong enough to terminate the pregnancy, but is strong enough fuck up the physiology involved, for both the mother and fetus. So, she'll still be in need of an abortion, but other health risks could pop up, and she may not know it until the fetus develops into some fucking nightmare fuel due to a partial medication dosage.
If any pharmacologists happen to read this, please weigh in. I'd guess the solution would be some kind of calculation like "if it's ___ months past its expiration date, take ____ pills to match the potency of one non-expired pill" and if that's the case, we need to get that info circulating asap.
I'm not aware of any research on plan B specifically; but most medicines retain there effectiveness for decades past their stated expiration date.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7040264/
That's definitely comforting - hopefully Plan B is among the 90%, but I still wouldn't feel comfortable with leaving it at 'probably'.
...or, y'know, we could stop passing laws that are designed to be as evil as fucking possible, and this whole conversation becomes moot. -_-