A year ago, when Kanuʻuhiwa Thomas, a twenty-four-year-old who lives in Hawaii, found out that she was two weeks pregnant, she decided to terminate the pregnancy. (Kanuʻuhiwa Thomas is an alias.) “I don’t have any type of support system,” Thomas told me. “I’m still trying to finish my schooling, which is really important to me because a lot of girls here don’t finish their education—they just get pregnant and maybe get married and have kids and have to live off the system. I’m just kind of adamant about making sure I can take care of a child before I have one.”
Hawaii has one of the most liberal abortion policies in the country, but, like many rural and geographically expansive states, services are hard to come by. At the time, only two of the Hawaiian Islands had abortion providers—Maui, which is a hundred miles from the Big Island, where Thomas lives, and Oahu, two hundred miles away. She began to make phone calls. “All I wanted was someone who could help me do it,” she said. “I was afraid they were going to scold me on the phone and hang up.” Eventually, she heard about a service called TelAbortion, which uses video conferencing to connect doctor and patient. Once an ultrasound confirms that the pregnancy is no more than ten weeks along and the TelAbortion physician gives the O.K., the patient is sent medications that, essentially, induce a miscarriage, ending the pregnancy.
Telemedicine—obtaining medical services over the phone or through the Internet—is not a new phenomenon. In the U.S., it began to take off in the late nineteen-fifties, and a 2016 federal grant to increase access to health care in rural areas has made it more mainstream. Medical abortion (as distinct from surgical) relies on a drug protocol that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000. What makes TelAbortion unique is the coupling of the two technologies. It enables a woman to terminate a pregnancy in the privacy of her own home, but with medical oversight.
The F.D.A. protocol, which involves two drugs—mifepristone and misoprostol—now accounts for thirty-one per cent of all non-hospital abortions in the United States, according to a 2014 study from the Guttmacher Institue, a nonprofit reproductive-health research and advocacy organization. When the two medications are taken together, they work between ninety-five and ninety-nine per cent of the time, depending on gestational age. Medical abortion has also proved to be safe. According to the Guttmacher Institute, complications from medical abortion result in hospitalization 0.4 per cent of the time. By contrast, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 2017, found that women are fourteen times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than from taking mifepristone for a medical abortion. (Mifepristone can be taken by itself, but it is more effective taken in tandem with misopristol.)
The TelAbortion service that Thomas hoped to use is part of a five-state trial that the reproductive-health initiative Gynuity launched, in 2016, in response to the ever-diminishing availability of abortion services in the United States. As of the end of January, two hundred and eighty-three women had received TelAbortions, a hundred and fifty-eight of them in Hawaii. The Gynuity trial, which is also available in New York, Oregon, Washington, and Maine, is not the first or the only medical-abortion protocol. More typically, women are required to visit a clinic and take the abortifacient drugs in the presence of a clinician. What makes the TelAbortion protocol so unusual is that once a woman consults with a physician, she is on her own.
Dr. Bliss Kaneshiro, an ob-gyn at the University of Hawaii, who is one of four physicians in her practice participating in the Gynuity trial, told me that consulting with patients over the Internet has been surprisingly intimate. “I was worried that the video visits wouldn’t be as personal as they are in the office, but I’ve found it’s very personal,” she said. “I get to glimpse into people’s lives. I see kids in the background and a partner listening. I see patients in their bedrooms. I get a sense of how this is playing out in their lives.”
So far, Kaneshiro has done about eighty telemedical abortions. “So many patients have vocalized how much they’ve preferred this de-medicalized process,” she said. One patient who lived a mile from the office simply preferred to communicate screen-to-screen. But most of the women in the trial, like Thomas, are hampered by geography, finding it expensive and often logistically impossible to access distant services. “I didn’t have to get a hotel or buy a flight to Oahu,” Thomas told me. “I got to be home, which was not just financially efficient, it was just comforting and private.” The total cost of her abortion was less than three hundred dollars.
Leah Coplon, who runs the Gynuity trial in Maine, said, “For some folks, it’s a scheduling issue. Even though we have very good access here in Maine, it still can be hard if somebody works nights or they only have child care on weekends.” This flexibility is vital, Coplon told me, but so is the opportunity to avoid the gauntlet of protesters who routinely show up at clinics that provide abortion services.
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