'We're not going to stop': Requests for abortion pills to be sent to US from Europe rise after Roe v Wade overturned

A European team shipping abortion pills to Americans says it has been receiving 4,000 requests a day since Roe v Wade was overturned – up from 600 to 700 previously.

Roe v Wade gave women the constitutional right to an abortion but it was overturned by the US Supreme Court last month, after existing for almost 50 years.

But Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts, who runs online-only service Aid Access and is registered as a doctor in Austria, said she had no intention of changing her work.

In a report by NBC News, Dr Gomperts said: “We will continue to serve women who need it.

“We’re not going to stop.

“We are expanding again our capacity, so we can help with all the requests that we get.”

Aid Access, founded in 2018, consists of four doctors supervising about 10 medical staff members.

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Potential patients visit the website and answer questions about their health, their pregnancy, and whether anyone is forcing them to seek an abortion.

The answers are reviewed by the medical team, who may prescribe abortion pills for women up to 10 weeks pregnant.

The service charges between $110 (£91) and $150 (£125), depending on where the patient is.

The pills are mailed from an Indian pharmacy which, along with Aid Access’s doctors, is beyond the reach of US and state authorities.

James Bopp, the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, told NBC: “The reality is state laws have limited extraterritorial effects.

“There’s no question that the federal government has much more authority, and we hope to get them on our side to make these state laws much more effective.”

‘We started off mostly with helping service women in the military’

Dr Gomperts told NBC: “It was clear in the last few years that access in the US was getting harder and harder and harder.”

“We started off mostly with helping service women in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, in South Korea and Japan”, she said, because US personnel in those countries had limited access.

But the service also had more than 57,000 requests from inside the US during its first two years.

Dr Gomperts said that the service has received 4,000 requests a day since Roe v Wade was overturned, up from 600 to 700 a day previously.

‘It shouldn’t have to be a foreign organisation’

But Dr Gomperts, who was named by Time magazine as one of its 100 most influential people of 2020, said she hopes Aid Access will eventually become unnecessary.

“It shouldn’t have to be a foreign organisation,” she said of the work done by the organisation.

“What should happen in the end is that the states like New York and California, liberal states, they should just make it possible for the doctors and providers there to ship the pills to the other states.”

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