Vol. 77/No. 33      September 23, 2013

Later that day, the Iowa Board of Medicine held an open hearing to discuss a proposal to shut the program down, which the board decided to do two days later. A vigil opposing women’s right to choose also took place in a church near the Capitol.

Since the first-in-the-nation telemedicine program began in 2008, women in rural areas of the state have been able to receive drugs to end a pregnancy after an ultrasound test and physical examination at a local clinic followed by an interview with a doctor in Des Moines via video hookup. The doctor can then dispense the pills to the clinic by computer. Some 8,000 women in Iowa have used the telemedicine program to obtain abortions.

These programs have recently become a flash point in the national fight over women’s right to choose abortion.

The 10 members of the Iowa medical board were recently appointed by Governor Branstad, an outspoken opponent of abortion rights. Two years ago, the board, with an entirely different make-up, ruled that the program could operate legally in the state.

During the hearing, about 30 speakers debated the proposal to ban telemedicine abortions. Several board members voiced opposition to the program.

Board chairman Dr. Greg Hoversten called the program an “experiment on Iowa women.”

“Telemed is often the only way rural women can access abortion services,” Natalie Scarpino, from the Crisis Intervention and Advocacy Center, which serves several rural counties, told the hearing.

“Attacks on a woman’s right to choose abortion have focused on denying ever larger layers of women access to abortion,” Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for city council in Des Moines, said at the hearing. “The proposals being considered by the Iowa Board of Medicine are part and parcel of this assault on women’s rights.”

Dr. Daniel Grossman told the board that a study he conducted showed the rate of complications for telemedicine and in-person visits is identical. There is a medical risk in restricting telemedicine, he added, because it could lead to later abortions and more surgical abortions, which have a slightly higher rate of complications.

Two days after the hearing, the board voted 8-2 to ban Planned Parenthood’s telemedicine program.

In recent years, laws or regulations barring doctors from using videoconferencing to prescribe abortion drugs have been enacted in 17 states. Although telemedicine “is increasingly popular in other medical settings, abortion is the only context in which states have sought to ban it,” reported Linda Greenhouse in the Sept. 4 New York Times.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided June 27 to review a case from Oklahoma that involves limits on access to drug-induced abortion. The court accepted the state of Oklahoma’s appeal of a December 2012 decision by that state’s Supreme Court to strike down a law limiting doctors’ ability to prescribe the drugs used in medical abortions.

“The medical abortion regimen, often referred to as RU-486, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 as a safe and effective alternative to surgical abortion early in the first trimester,” wrote Greenhouse. “It has been used since then by close to two million American women, currently about 200,000 a year out of some 1.2 million abortions performed annually.”  
 
 
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