WASHINGTON — The Iowa Supreme Court struck down a rule on Friday that would have prohibited doctors from using telemedicine to dispense abortion-inducing pills to patients in remote clinics around the state, saying the ban placed an “undue burden” on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

Planned Parenthood clinics in Iowa have been using telemedicine to provide medication-induced, nonsurgical abortions since 2008, seeing it as a way to expand access to women living in the state’s many rural areas. Under the system, the first in the nation, doctors in Des Moines, Iowa City and Ames have used videoconferencing to provide the service to more than 7,000 patients in seven clinics.

In these appointments, the doctor first consults with the patient, who is sitting with a nurse and has already had an ultrasound and laboratory work. Then the doctor clicks a button on a computer screen to open a remote-controlled drawer in the patient’s exam room that contains the medicine and watches the patient swallow it.

In 2013, the Iowa Board of Medicine passed a rule requiring doctors to perform examinations in person before giving women abortion-inducing drugs, and also to be physically present when the patients take the drugs. The board members, all appointed by Gov. Terry E. Branstad, a Republican, who opposes abortion, said at the time that the drugs could cause complications and that dispensing them from a remote location was unsafe. But the ban was set aside while Planned Parenthood fought it in court.