The FDA approved mifepristone under the brand-name Mifeprex in 2000, and an abortion-drug regimen that has seen few deaths and a low rate of adverse events in more than two decades of use. (Photo by Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)
The rate of Floridians getting medicinal abortions fell by nearly four percentage points between 2021 and 2022, but abortion-inducing pills remained the most used method of terminating pregnancies, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shows.
Out of nearly 80,000 abortions that took place in Florida in 2022 — and of which the method used to carry out the abortion is known — 42% were medicinal, the latest CDC abortion surveillance report published Wednesday shows.
Back in 2017, when Florida began reporting the method of abortions to the CDC, medicinal abortions made up 42% of pregnancy terminations and the remainder were procedural. Medicinal abortions involve taking two pills. The first, mifepristone, stops the pregnancy, and the second, misoprostol, is taken 24 to 48 hours later, causing contractions for the body to expel the pregnancy tissue.
The increase in medicinal abortions, which are typically used up until 11 weeks’ gestation, is also happening across the nation, with an increase of 21 percentage points. However, the CDC report doesn’t include data from California, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
“What we’re seeing more broadly is a shift toward medication abortion in a lot of states,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist for the Guttmacher Institute, in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix. “That’s that’s for a couple of reasons. One of them is that it’s a way that clinics have been able to increase their capacity to provide care, especially when they’re seeing a lot of out-of-state patients, or when they’re having other capacity issues because their clinics in general are under a lot of strain.”
Medicinal abortions under the six-week ban
Prior to the enactment on May 1 of the state law banning most abortions after six weeks’ gestation, Florida reported a growing percentage of people traveling into the state for abortions. In 2017, non-Floridians accounted for 4% of the people seeking abortions, and in 2023 that percentage rose to 9%, Florida Agency for Health Care Administration abortion data show.
Whether medicinal abortions will continue making up a growing percentage of abortions under the six-week ban is unknown. So far this year, AHCA has reported 52,753 abortions, though the data the agency publishes doesn’t break down the method of those abortions.
“You might expect it to shift to potentially a little bit toward medication abortion among the abortions that are still occurring in Florida because many of the people who are at later gestational durations now are likely going to need to travel outside of Florida, or likely are already traveling outside of Florida to receive care,” Maddow-Zimet said. “So again, it’s not necessarily a change in the distribution for Florida residents, but just a change in distribution for those abortions that are actually occurring in Florida, but I think we don’t 100% know.”
Other restrictions also make it harder for people to access the abortion pill in Florida. For example, people have to see a medical doctor in person and can’t get a medicinal abortion via telehealth, which has led to the increased use of the pill in other states, an October report from the Society of Family Planning shows.