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The administration of President Biden will temporarily lift a medication abortion restriction. It requires abortion pills to be dispensed in person. The temporary lift will reverse a Trump-era policy and handing abortion-rights groups one of their first major victories of the new administration. The acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock announced that her agency would “exercise enforcement discretion” surrounding the FDA’s requirement that abortion patients using mifepristone to terminate a pregnancy obtain the pills in-person from a medical provider. The decision will allow providers in some states to prescribe via telemedicine and send the pills in the mail. Citing four medical publications, Woodcock wrote, “These studies do not appear to show increases in serious safety concerns, occurring with medical abortion as a result of modifying the in-person dispensing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

This decision reverses a Trump administration policy supported by the Supreme Court earlier this year. ACOG represents about 90% of obstetricians and gynecologists in the field, requested last year that the FDA should lift its long-standing requirement that mifepristone (Mifeprex) be dispensed by a doctor in person. The medical group argued that not only was the in-person requirement medically unnecessary, but in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic placed patients and medical staff at risk of exposure to the virus. When the FDA rejected the request, ACOG and a coalition of medical organizations sued, and in July a federal court agreed, temporarily suspending the FDA’s in-person rule. In August an appellate court unanimously declined the Trump administration’s request to reverse the lower court’s decision.

Two weeks later, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court, asking for it to block the lower courts’ orders. In that request, attorneys for the FDA wrote that the drug used in medication abortion carries serious risks including bleeding requiring surgical intervention and that in-person dispensing mitigates those risks. In January, the justices allowed the Trump administration to reinstate the in-person requirement, reversing the lower courts’ decisions. The Supreme Court’s decision was its first major action on abortion since Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed last fall. ACOG chief executive officer Maureen G. Phipps issued a statement and said, “By halting enforcement of the in-person dispensing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA is recognizing and responding to the available evidence, which has clearly and definitively demonstrated that the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone is unnecessary and restrictive”.