Reclaim your rights! A New Post-Roe Strategy

Women on Waves crowdfunder

So it happened. Roe is overturned and conservative supreme court judges will be there for another 30 years. So we need a new strategy to advance our reproductive freedom. 

Here is our plan. 

The abortion pill, Mifepristone, can also be used as a weekly on-demand contraceptive. We are now starting a large clinical trial to confirm its efficacy and safety. After the trial, Mifepristone can be registered and distributed as a contraceptive. You could then use Mifepristone once a week to avoid getting pregnant. It also works as a morning-after pill or to end an early pregnancy. In this way, it challenges the very difference between contraception and abortion. 

Current oral contraceptive options are far from ideal. You have to use them every day and many women experience side effects, including risk of thrombosis, depression and breast cancer. Almost half the women on the pill stop within three years because they are dissatisfied with the method. 

Mifepristone, is an anti-progesterone is an extremely effective morning-after pill and holds great promise as a weekly on-demand contraceptive. And it does not have the side effects of existing contraception (OC). Widely available and proven safe, Mifepristone can fundamentally change the way women all over the world will be able to control their fertility. 

It would allow us to move flexibly between the medicine’s different indications as weekly contraceptive, as an on-demand method used before or after sexual intercourse or as an early medical abortion method, depending on our life circumstances. 

Smaller clinical trials have confirmed that Mifepristone is safe and works as a contraceptive. But we need more extensive studies to get the drug approved and clinically implemented. So that is why Women on Waves together with Leiden Medical University and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden is setting up the required clinical trial at the moment, which could change the reproductive landscape for women across the world. 

An international experienced medical, scientific and ethics team has been convened by Women on Waves to conduct these larger clinical trials in keeping with the requirements of the FDA and European Medicine Agency (EMA, which has advised on this project. After completing the study with success, other organisations have already committed to making Mifepristone available around the world. Seven hospitals have joined the trial and we have all clinical and ethical approvals in place to get started. 

To complete the study of 949 women using weekly mifepristone for a year, to provide the data we need in order to register it as a weekly contraceptive with the EMA, we need 2.2 million euro. We have already raised 500.000 euro and we can already start the study when we can raise another 500.000 euro.

You can join this new, game-changing contraceptive strategy. Perhaps it will not be the pharmaceutical companies, but women — and those who love them — who will make the change. 

Even if states ban the abortion pill, this new on demand contraceptive method can always be accessible through local or international (telemedical) services.

If you would like to get the full study protocol and study approvals, please send a message by clicking on the contact button

If you need abortion pills now please go to www.aidaccess.org

For more information about the work of Women on Waves, you can watch this documentary

For more information about Dr Rebecca Gomperts

Women on Waves