A container holding boxes of mifepristone, the primary medication in a medical abortion, are prepared for patients at Alamo Women’s Clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, on April 20, 2023.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
CVS and Walgreens will start selling the abortion pill mifepristone this month at certain pharmacy locations in states where it’s legal to achieve this, spokespeople for the businesses told CNBC on Friday.
CVS and Walgreens received certification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to dispense the commonly used pill at their retail pharmacies, spokespeople for every company said in separate statements.
CVS will begin filling prescriptions for the medication in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the approaching weeks, a spokesperson for the corporate said. They added that CVS will expand to additional states, “where allowed by law, on a rolling basis.”
Walgreens expects to start out shelling out prescriptions for the pill inside per week at select pharmacy locations in Latest York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California and Illinois, an organization spokesperson said.
Notably, the chains won’t provide the medication by mail. The Latest York Times reported the news earlier Friday.
Mifepristone is the primary pill utilized in the two-drug medication abortion regimen.
The FDA is squaring off with anti-abortion physicians in an unprecedented legal challenge to its greater than two-decade-old approval of mifepristone. An anti-abortion rights group sued the agency in 2022 in a bid to declare that approval illegal and completely remove the pill from the U.S. market
On March 26, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in that closely watched case.
The FDA in January said it would allow retail pharmacies to supply mifepristone within the U.S. for the primary time.
Under a regulatory change on the agency, pharmacies can apply for certification to distribute the pill with one in all the 2 firms that make it. That certification would allow pharmacies to dispense the medication on to patients upon receiving a prescription from an authorized prescriber.
Before the FDA’s regulatory change, only a number of mail-order pharmacies or specially certified doctors or clinics could distribute mifepristone.
The regulatory change will potentially expand abortion access because the Biden administration wrestles with how best to guard abortion rights. The appropriate to abortion within the U.S. was sharply curtailed by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
The Biden administration has sought to make abortion and contraception access a predominant platform of the president’s 2024 campaign.
Medication abortion is essentially the most common approach to terminating a pregnancy within the U.S., in response to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That method is approved by the FDA to be used as much as 10 weeks into pregnancy.
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