Abortion pill loophole advertised during Indy 500
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Photo: Courtesy of Mayday Health
If you were at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway over the weekend, you may have noticed planes flying overhead advertising everything from Mountain Dew to abortion pills.
Why it matters: Indiana was the first state in the nation to ban nearly all abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The big picture: Abortion is banned statewide except in limited cases to save the life or prevent serious risk to the health of the pregnant person, if there is a lethal fetal anomaly or within the first 10 weeks postfertilization of a pregnancy that is the result of rape or incest.
Driving the news: From Carb Day through race day, abortion education nonprofit Mayday Health hired a plane to fly over Speedway with a banner advertising "abortion pills by mail."
What they're saying: "What we want to communicate is, no matter where you live, you still have options," Liv Raisner, Mayday's founder and executive director, told Axios. "We knew that 350,000 people were going to be around that racetrack on race day. What a great way to reach a high volume of people in a state where abortion is banned."
Between the lines: Indiana law says that telehealth may not be used for abortion, but federal regulation allows for abortion medication to be dispensed by pharmacies through the mail, and there are online providers who ship to all 50 states.
- Mayday, which works in the education space only and doesn't prescribe or distribute the pills, explains that the prescribers are often working in states with shield laws that offer protection for practitioners in abortion-friendly states.
State of play: Americans have been using this workaround since the fall of Roe.
- A survey released last year reported that 8,000 women a month, living in states that severely restrict abortion or access to such services through telehealth, were having abortion pills mailed to them by the end of 2023.
How it works: A medical abortion typically works by taking a combination of two medications in pill form — mifepristone and misoprostol.
- This can be done safely up to the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The fine print: While performing an abortion outside of the state's limited exceptions is a crime in Indiana, self-managed abortion is not.
- The state's abortion law does not include legal penalties for a person choosing to have an abortion.
By the numbers: There were 142 abortions performed in hospitals statewide last year, according to the Indiana Department of Health — that's a 98% decrease from 2022, the last full year before the state ban went into effect.
- Nearly 60% were medication abortions.
- Two-thirds were performed because of a lethal fetal anomaly.