Pharmacists have begun prescribing abortion pillsrich9, not simply dispensing the medication — a development intended to broaden abortion access by taking advantage of rules that give them prescribing ability in most states.
The new effort is small so far — a pilot program in Washington State — but the idea is expected to be tried in other states where abortion remains legal.
“I think it is going to expand, and it is expanding,” said Michael Hogue, chief executive of the American Pharmacists Association, a national professional organization, which is not involved in the new program and does not take a position on abortion.
Nearly 40 states now allow pharmacists to prescribe at least some medications and they are trained to do so, he said. He added that in his organization’s view, it makes sense to have “someone so accessible in a local community be able to provide safe access to therapies that might sometimes be difficult to get.”
Supporters of abortion rights consider pharmacist prescribing part of an effort to open as many avenues as possible at a time when abortion pills are facing growing attacks from abortion opponents.
Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.
mental slotMr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.
Pharmacists are regulated by states, so their ability to prescribe specific medications cannot be blocked by the federal government. But if the incoming Trump administration wanted to stop pharmacists from prescribing abortion pills, it could try to reinstate Food and Drug Administration regulations that required that only doctors prescribe mifepristone, the first pill in the two-drug medication abortion regimen.
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