FDA Eases Abortion Pill Guidelines By Susan McLean

NYT covered this change below:

The announcement on Wednesday came unexpectedly in the final stretch of the Obama administration and amid an election campaign in which both parties covet the women’s vote. Some abortion opponents charged that the new regimen was politically motivated. The F.D.A. said its actions were based strictly on medical science.

The change was an unequivocal victory for abortion rights advocates who had been fighting laws in Texas, North Dakota and Ohio, among other states, that require doctors prescribing the pill to follow the directions on the F.D.A. label for using it, which had been more stringent.

The change brings the directions for taking the drug, mifepristone, in line with what has become standard medical practice in most states: reducing the dosage to 200 milligrams from 600 milligrams, decreasing the number of visits a woman must make to a doctor to two from three, and extending the period when she can take the pill to 10 weeks of pregnancy from seven weeks.
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The debate over the drug, formerly known as RU-486, has raged for decades, with abortion rights groups demanding access to it in the United States in the 1990s. Medication-induced abortions have increasingly been used to terminate pregnancies in recent years, and limiting access to them has become an important front in the anti-abortion movement. They made up as much as a quarter of all abortions in 2011, according to the most recent figures from the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks women’s reproductive health issues. Planned Parenthood said as many as half of eligible women in its clinics requested medication-induced abortions.

This easing up on the limiting of access is good for women and should be considered a feminist victory. #RightToChoose. Read more here.