In the months since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, more and more women have safely ended their pregnancies at home, without ever setting foot in an abortion clinic.

Between the pre-Dobbs period1 and the post-Dobbs period,2 the number of abortions performed by virtual-only providers rose by 76 percent, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of new data from #WeCount, a national research project led by the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that supports research on abortion and contraception.3 By the end of 2022, 11 percent of all the abortions counted by the project were performed entirely virtually using abortion pills — a remarkable rise of almost seven percentage points in less than a year and a sign of how quickly women in states where abortion remains legal are coming to rely on pills obtained through telehealth to end their pregnancies.

But depending on how a legal battle over a drug typically used in a medication abortion unfolds, that could change. Last week, a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, issued a ruling that invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the first of two drugs used in nearly all medication abortions performed in the U.S. Kacsmaryk also ruled that the FDA broke an 1873 law, which hasn’t been enforced in almost a century, when it allowed abortion providers to send pills through the mail. The fate of the decision, which the judge stayed for seven days to allow the government to appeal, is still unknown — but it underscores that even though telehealth is transforming the way abortion happens in the U.S., this new form of access remains precarious.

Read the full article about virtual Abortions by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at FiveThirtyEight.