Until the Lege reconvenes, anyway.
There’s been a sharp increase in the number of Texas women who are using the abortion pill to end their pregnancies now that federal officials have eased restrictions on the drug, according to officials at Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.
Until recently, the number of women seeking medically induced abortions at Texas’ Planned Parenthood facilities had dipped to about 1 percent because of stringent guidelines put in place by state lawmakers, officials say.
That changed in late March, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxed guidelinesfor women taking mifepristone, a pill geared to induce abortion early in a pregnancy.
“We have seen a fourfold increase in the number of our patients choosing medication abortion since the FDA updated its protocol,” said Sarah J. Wheat, chief external affairs officer at Planned Parenthood. “From our perspective, it’s restoring options for women.
“It’s putting decisions back in the hands of women instead of politicians at the Capitol.”
No firm numbers are available yet, but Texas researchers and abortion providers say they see the increase and hope to have better estimates in the coming months.
[…]
Planned Parenthood continues to run clinics statewide, including the Southwest Fort Worth Health Center, a privately funded $6.5 million licensed ambulatory surgical center that opened in 2013.
A medical abortion has remained an option for patients at these facilities, but fewer women have used it because Texas law required them to visit the clinic four times for it, said Daniel Grossman, an investigator with the Texas Policy Evaluation Project and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
“In the six months after HB 2 went into effect, there was a 70 percent decline in medication abortions performed statewide,” said Grossman, who is working with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin to determine the impact of legislation on abortions. “Interviews with women … [showed they were] incredibly frustrated when they had a preference for medication abortion” and couldn’t get it.
Wheat said some women have had to travel 100 miles or more to reach a Planned Parenthood clinic, which put a hardship on them for multiple visits.
“That requirement alone created huge barriers for our patients,” she said.
Now that the FDA change has loosened restrictions in Texas — requiring a lower dose, 200 milligrams instead of 600 milligrams; fewer doctor visits; and allowing the medication up to 10 weeks in a pregnancy instead of seven weeks — more women are choosing the medical abortion option, Wheat and Grossman say.
Exact numbers won’t be available for weeks or months, but “many of the independent abortion providers who have already started using the new FDA regimen are saying their numbers are back up,” Grossman said. “Many women have a preference and prefer this.”
[…]
Now the question is whether Texas lawmakers will weigh in on the issue when they return to work in January.
Planned Parenthood officials say they hope not.
“The restrictions the Legislature put in place were not based in science,” Wheat said. “The FDA is the national expert in how medications are provided, and they approved these updates.
See here for the background. I’d laugh at the futility of hoping that science and rationality would prevail if it weren’t so painful. The best hope as I see it is for HB2 to be sufficiently gutted by the Supreme Court. That will surely only slow down the zealots, but it’s probably the best we can expect until we start electing different leaders.