How Long Do Abortion Pills Last?
Medical abortion involves taking two types of pills. One of them, mifepristone, has been subject to all kinds of restrictive measures over the years – until this year, you could not even get a prescription from a regular pharmacy. And now, as our Jezebel friends report , an anti-abortion judge is considering revoking the FDA’s approval. You might want to order the pills right now, they suggest.
First: yes, it is absolutely ridiculous that a single asshole judge could potentially disapprove a drug that has been safely used in this country for 23 years . In a healthy world, this would not happen. But the decision could be made as early as February 10, so you might want to be prepared.
Medical abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol is legal in the US up to 10 weeks of gestation . (The World Health Organization recommends up to 12 weeks.) After that, your options tend to be limited to in-clinic procedures such as vacuum aspiration.
When you take abortion pills, mifepristone, a controversial drug, blocks progesterone and stops the development of the embryo. Another drug, misoprostol, causes cramping and bleeding when the uterus empties. (Misoprostol is also used to end a natural miscarriage and is also used for other purposes, such as preventing NSAID-induced stomach ulcers .)
As Jezebel points out, Aid Access and Choix will mail you abortion pills even if you’re not currently pregnant: this is called “advance provision” and the idea is that you’ll have medication on hand in case they you will ever need.
How long does mifepristone last?
Medicines have an expiration date on their packaging, and like food expiration dates, they indicate that the medicine will still contain the right ingredients in the right amounts , at least for that long. So, your first step is to check the expiration date on the packaging of the medicines you receive. If this date has not yet arrived, and you have stored the medicine at room temperature in an airtight container, you should be fine.
But the medicine may take longer to work. Clinician and public health researcher Daniel Grossman pointed out that mifepristone is generally thought to last “about five years”, while its partner misoprostol typically has a two-year shelf life. Misoprostol is not in danger of being banned or not approved, so here we will focus on mifepristone.
In fact, trials have yielded varying estimates of the shelf life of mifepristone, ranging from two to five years. If the medicine is stored outside the sealed blister pack, it is likely to degrade much faster .
If your box of mifepristone has expired, the main risk is that you don’t know for sure if it will be powerful enough to force your body into aborting. If your medication has expired and you can talk to your doctor about it, it might be worth asking if they think it’s wise to keep taking the pills.