PHOTO: Jackie Molloy for The New York Times
Pharmacists have begun prescribing abortion pills, not simply dispensing the medication — a development intended to broaden abortion access by taking advantage of rules that give them prescribing ability in most states.
The state of Washington’s pilot program is the first, but other US states where abortion remains legal are expected to try allowing pharmacists to prescribe abortion pills to counter growing efforts to curtail abortion access.
“I think it is going to expand, and it is expanding,” said Michael Hogue, chief executive of the American Pharmacists Association, a national professional organization, which is not involved in the new program and does not take a position on abortion.
Nearly 40 states now allow pharmacists to prescribe at least some medications and they are trained to do so, he said. He added that in his organization’s view, it makes sense to have “someone so accessible in a local community be able to provide safe access to therapies that might sometimes be difficult to get.”
Supporters of abortion rights consider pharmacist prescribing part of an effort to open as many avenues as possible at a time when abortion pills are facing growing attacks from abortion opponents.
Pharmacists are regulated by states, so their ability to prescribe specific medications cannot be blocked by the federal government.
The Pharmacist Abortion Access Project reported that in a pilot program conducted between Oct. 31 and Nov. 26 in 2024, 10 pharmacists across Washington State had prescribed abortion pills to 43 patients. The prescribing was done via telehealth screening, with patients completing forms asking about their pregnancy and medical history. Patients had to be Washington residents and could be up to 10 weeks pregnant. They paid $40, significantly less than many services. Prescriptions were transmitted to Honeybee Health, a California-based mail-order pharmacy that works with many telemedicine abortion services, which shipped the pills to patients.
Don Downing, a co-director of the project and a professor emeritus of pharmacy at the University of Washington, said that in addition to providing a hotline for questions or concerns, pharmacists had contacted patients to see if they were doing all right. He said that during the follow-up, patients had asked typical questions, like whether they were experiencing appropriate levels of bleeding from passing the pregnancy tissue. “We did not have any seriously negative outcomes at all, but we had a full network of other resources available in case that happened, so that we could take care of them.”
Dr Rivin said the project intends for full-fledged pharmacist prescribing to start sometime this year and to eventually allow in-person prescribing in Washington pharmacies, meaning patients could go to a pharmacy and receive a prescription and pills in one visit, in line with recent FDA policy. Last year, national pharmacy chains, Walgreens and CVS, began dispensing mifepristone in some states, as did scores of smaller pharmacies in at least a dozen states.
SOURCE: New York Times, by Pam Belluck. 7 January 2025.