Since 2000, more than 2 million women have used the drug to have an abortion in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. Twenty-three percent of women who have an abortion today get a so-called medical abortion—most of them, using mifeprex. The drug has radically reshaped abortion availability for rural women. [...] But the 2 million figure belies a sustained, and in many cases, successful campaign by conservative lawmakers and activists to put mifepristone out of reach. [...] Abortion foes have been so successful in limiting the abortion pill that a decade and a half after the drug was approved, women having abortions in the United States are much less likely to use mifepristone than many of their foreign counterparts. Only a quarter of abortions in the United States use any kind of abortion drug. In France, Scotland, and Sweden, by contrast, more than half of early abortions are performed using mifepristone.

Since 2011, 18 states have banned telemedicine abortions—nine of them before local abortion providers had even gotten a telemedicine program like Iowa's up and running. In Iowa, the program was nearly eliminated: In 2013, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad appointed a Catholic priest who had lobbied against it to the nine-person state board of medicine, which promptly shut down the program—though it was saved in the end by the Iowa Supreme Court.

It was 15 years ago this month that the Food and Drug Administration first approved the abortion pill. Ever since, conservatives have devoted themselves to killing one of the safest and most effective methods of abortion, reports Molly Redden.Conservative efforts to curtail mifepristone use have mainly taken two routes: banning telemedicine that is often used to administer the drugs to women in rural areas; and limiting access to the drug by making both the travel and the cost overly burdensome.Btw, it's totally safe and effective for women to take their second dose while being monitored by a doctor via video.

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