Planned Parenthood now offering abortion pills via app across Illinois to expand access
Bottles of abortion pills mifepristone, left, and misoprostol, right, are shown, Sept. 22, 2010, at a clinic in Des Moines, Iowa. Planned Parenthood is launching a new service on its app that will allow people in Illinois to request access to the drugs without seeing a doctor.
Charlie Neibergall/AP
Looking to expand access to medication abortion in Illinois, Planned Parenthood will allow people to request access to the drugs without seeing a doctor.
Patients up to 10 weeks pregnant can fill out screening questions on the Planned Parenthood “Direct” app and provide an Illinois address where their medication abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol would be mailed if they qualify. That could be a house or a hotel.
Some Planned Parenthood affiliates already are mailing pills to patients but require at least a virtual visit with a medical provider first.
“This is just for us the next step in reducing barriers for folks who don’t want to make it all the way to a health center or who need the privacy of being able to do it from their home,” says Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer for Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region & Southwest Missouri.
She says a provider will review a patient’s answers via the app within 24 hours and, if approved, mail the medication without a visit with a doctor.
McNicholas’ Planned Parenthood affiliate is implementing the program for all patients in Illinois.
McNicholas says Planned Parenthood affiliates in Maryland, Washington and Hawaii provide this service via the PP Direct app, too, and there also are other companies and providers across the country that do so.
The latest move to expand access to abortion in Illinois comes as the Supreme Court weighs whether to block access to mifepristone, which is used as part of a two-drug combination to end a pregnancy.
If that happens, McNicholas says her providers would move to offering misoprostol only. McNicholas works at a clinic in Fairview Heights in southern Illinois, just across the border from Missouri, where abortion is banned.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago, ending the constitutional right to an abortion. Since then, more than a dozen states have banned or heavily restricted the procedure. Many of these states are in the Midwest and the South, fueling a pipeline of patients to Illinois.
Illinois was among states seeing the biggest surges in abortions from April 2022 to December 2023, according to a new report from WeCount, an organization that tracks abortion trends. There also was a big surge in Florida, which recently banned most abortions after six weeks.
McNicholas says she hopes the new service for medication abortion in Illinois will open up appointments for patients who want or need to have an abortion in person in Fairview Heights. If more people use the app, she says, they might not seek an appointment at the clinic.
Since Florida banned most abortions on May 1, there have been more calls for appointments, and wait times for a procedure are creeping up to a week, according to McNicholas. She says waits of about a week are an “operational flag” at which point her team would decide either to work longer days or add more days in the week when they provide abortions.
“Not there yet, but we are getting close again,” McNicholas says.
The new service via PP Direct will cost $200 and isn’t covered by insurance, though McNicholas says Planned Parenthood is trying to get insurers to do so. Patients already use PP Direct for other services, such as birth control or treatment for urinary tract infections.