Abortion Pills in Every Medicine Cabinet
  June 26, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Happy MAFS Thursday to all who observe. While this season has been quite enjoyable, I am ready for Shawn and Nikki to shake hands and exit stage left. It’s getting painful. In today’s newsletter, Nona Willis Aronowitz digs into the game plan if Todd Blanche makes good on his anti-abortion threats. Plus, the small pleasure giving us a mood boost this week. Locked in, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONPlan A(bortion): You may have heard the terrifying recent audio of Attorney General hopeful Todd Blanche buttering up anti-abortion faith leaders by telling them he planned to make “the Dobbs decision…permanent in every single state.” Since the Department of Justice can’t pass national abortion bans, what he actually meant was that under his leadership, the DOJ would enforce the long-ignored Comstock Act. The infamous 19th-century law prohibits (among other “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” things) the shipping of abortion medication, a now-widespread practice that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has called “a scheme to undermine” Dobbs. This incident got me thinking, as I do every time a Republican issues a new threat against the medication responsible for two out of three U.S. abortions: Should we all be stocking up on abortion pills? You know, just in case Blanche keeps his promise. Or just in case the FDA restricts mifepristone. Just in case we find ourselves pregnant and don’t want to wait days or weeks remaining that way. Just in case someone we love is unhappily pregnant and can’t afford the pills’ approximately $150 price tag. Abortion-rights advocates have actually been urging us to advance-order abortion pills for years, especially since Dobbs. But how often is it happening, really? And what would it take to make it a common practice? It was just a few years ago that only a sliver of the population knew that you could get abortion pills in the mail, much less get them before you were pregnant. Then COVID happened, followed by Dobbs. Now, one in four abortions are done through mailed pills, with nearly all abortions happening this way in abortion-ban states. Experts say “advanced provision” became more common after Roe v. Wade fell in 2022. (One study found that between August 2021 and March 2023, around 13% of patients who ordered abortion medication through telehealth were doing so in advance.) Many telehealth services across the country explicitly offer this option and, in most cases, you don’t even need to talk directly to a provider. The idea has gone so mainstream that Planned Parenthood in Washington and Hawai’i began offering “just in case” abortion pills recently. So…how’s it going? “Really well,” Rebecca Gibron, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai‘i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, tells The Meteor. She says that since Dobbs, the organization has felt “a responsibility to work double-time” and advanced provision “was just the logical next step in advancing access to abortion care.” Providers at Planned Parenthood clinics in Washington and Hawai’i have been suggesting the just-in-case option at patients’ annual appointments and advertising it on their social media. “We know that timing matters in accessing abortion care,” Gibron says. “And when someone decides that they don’t want to be pregnant, every day of delay is an extra day of anxiety.”  A PACKAGE OF ABORTION PILLS FROM MASSACHUSETTS-BASED TELEHEALTH SERVICE THE MAP. THE “WE WISH YOU THE BEST!” NOTE IS SO SWEET! (VIA GETTY) So why hasn’t everyone stocked up on pills by now, the same way they might buy a fire extinguisher or, as Abortion Every Day’s Jessica Valenti pointed out, keep some Narcan on deck? Amy Merrill, co-founder of the abortion resource organization Plan C, tells me it’s simple: stigma. “The medication itself has been so charged in our culture,” she says. Even for people in blue parts of the country, there “may be confusion around, ‘Is it okay for me to have this medication in my house?’” I think she’s right. When I surveyed my (very pro-choice, politically active) friends and followers, only a few people said they had ordered pills in advance. I am not one of them. Merrill asked me why not, and it’s a good question. Part of it is cost—$150 is a lot of money for something I may never use (although many services do offer a sliding scale). I also, perhaps naively, believe an abortion would be pretty easy to get in my home state of New York, even if something were to happen to mifepristone access. But as I began to fill out these telehealth organizations’ online forms as research for this piece, I realized maybe I do have some instinctual fear that I’ll get in trouble somehow. This fear is not entirely irrational, especially for people who live under abortion bans–law enforcement will sometimes go after people who self-manage their abortions, even though doing so is not a crime in 47 states. And while I know the risks are much higher for providers than for patients, I still felt nervous reading all the legal warnings in the FAQs. I flinched a little every time I was asked for my name. The form that felt the easiest and safest was the one on Aid Access, a service that prominently advertises in-advance pills and uses reassuring language like “We do not judge you.” It may be no coincidence that its founder is not American. All this is to say, if someone like me feels skittish, we have a long way to go before the average person keeps abortion pills on hand. But cultural norms can change quickly. While Merrill appreciates the Narcan comparison—it’s “harm reduction for the circumstances we’re living in”—she thinks a better analogy is the fight in the early aughts to get emergency contraception over the counter. It seems normal now, but having the “morning-after” medication Plan B hanging next to the condoms in the sexual wellness aisle was a hard-fought, piecemeal victory in which Merrill’s Plan C cofounders, Elisa Wells and Francine Coeytaux, were instrumental. As someone who vividly remembers when you needed a prescription for Plan B, and all the bipartisan pearl-clutching surrounding its access, it still strikes me as remarkable how unremarkable it’s become in my lifetime. As of 2021, a quarter of 22-to-49-year-old women had used emergency contraception. Maybe it’s time for us to take the same approach to stocking abortion pills. Recent research shows that over-the-counter abortion pills are safe, and Merrill thinks there’s a real opportunity to recast the medication as a “public health tool that allows people to reclaim agency in the face of unjust and unmedical bans.” But before that can ever happen, we all need to get more comfortable having those pills sent to our homes, with our names on them. Plan C has detailed instructions on the logistics, including how people in ban states can protect themselves. The normalizing part is up to us. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 ADD TO CART. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 MOOD BOOSTEREvery Thursday, one of our editors shares a small thing that’s getting them through. If you’ve got something brightening your week, we want to know—reply to this email and share! Few things feel better than successfully executing a well-laid plan, especially when that plan involves one of my favorite things: day dates. My husband and I began our decade-plus relationship in the darkness of a crowded bar, but we learned very quickly that dates in the day are a far better use of our limited time. So when we first saw the trailer for “The Odyssey” months ago, we knew we would be catching it midday—as Nolan and our three-year-old’s schedule intended. We mapped out childcare weeks in advance and, with the same level of tactical planning involved in scaling a Trojan wall, arranged the time, snacks, seating arrangement, and bathroom timing. Everything went off without a hitch and our bladders held up during the loudest three-hour adventure I’ve ever endured. And the movie lived up to the hype. —Shannon Melero  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
