Tell the Biden Administration: Safe Access to Abortion Now

UPDATE 3/19/2021: In coordination with reproductive rights, health, and justice groups, the ACLU delivered nearly 50,000 signatures from supporters like you to the White House. The fight is not over and your action is still crucial. Join us in urging the Biden administration to ensure everyone can safely access medication abortion care in the pandemic and beyond. Sign the petition.

In its first 100 days, the Biden-Harris administration must continue the urgent work to reverse Trump-era policies on reproductive health – and expand access to abortion for all. One immediate priority is to lift the FDA’s medically unnecessary and harmful restrictions on medication abortion. Join us in urging the administration to take action now.

Despite soaring rates of COVID-19 infection, the Supreme Court recently allowed the Trump administration to reinstate a dangerous FDA requirement that patients travel in person to pick up mifepristone – a safe and effective medication used for early abortion and miscarriage treatment. As a result, patients must risk needless exposure to the virus to access care.

This is particularly harmful for people of color and people with low incomes, who make up the majority of impacted patients and are also dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates due to centuries of structural racism and inequities.

There is no medical reason for such government-mandated harm. That is why leading medical authorities are calling to suspend this requirement during the pandemic – and were already calling to permanently lift the FDA’s outdated and burdensome restrictions on mifepristone even before COVID-19.

The Biden-Harris administration can take two immediate actions to ensure safe access to medication abortion during the pandemic and beyond:

1. Immediately suspend enforcement of the in-person requirement for mifepristone for the duration of the pandemic – consistent with the government’s approach to other medications.
2. Initiate a comprehensive FDA review of all current restrictions on mifepristone. The in-person requirement is only one of many outdated, medically-unnecessary restrictions on this safe medication. This package of restrictions is long overdue for a review.

Science, not politics, should determine policy around time-sensitive and essential health care like abortion. While President Biden has taken important first actions to reverse the damage of the Trump years, more must be done to fully advance reproductive freedom for all – especially when an FDA mandate is subjecting abortion and miscarriage patients to needless COVID-19 risk every day.

Sign our petition today urging the Biden administration to ensure safe access to medication abortion – during the pandemic and beyond.