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Two of America’s biggest pharmacy chains will start selling the abortion pill mifepristone at their stores in several states this month.

CVS and Walgreens announced that the stores can now offer the medication following a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to allow retailers to stock the drug as opposed to just medical clinics.

Walgreens expects to begin dispensing the pills within a week in a small number of pharmacies in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California and Illinois.

According to company spokeswoman Amy Thibault, CVS will begin filling mifepristone in all pharmacies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ‘in the weeks ahead’ and expand to additional states, where allowed by law, on a rolling basis.

President Joe Biden said Friday that the availability of the pill was ‘an important milestone in ensuring access to mifepristone.’ 

Independent peer reviewers retracted studies pertaining to mifepristone, one of two drugs used to initiate an abortion, 비아그라시알리스차이 citing conflicts of interest and misleading and inaccurate analysis of data

CVS and Walgreens will not seek certification to dispense the abortion-inducing drug regimen in red states where abortion has been restricted or banned

CVS officials had announced last year that they would seek federal certification to sell the abortion-inducing drugs with a prescription, expanding access to them beyond mail-order pharmacies and doctors clinics. 

It’s unclear what level of demand these pharmacies will see for the drugs, which are available via mail and at doctors’ offices states that do not penalize abortion. 

They said that they would not expand the policy to states where abortion has been banned or restricted, which is about half of the US.

Ms Thibault told the New York Times: ‘We continually monitor and evaluate changes in state laws and will dispense mifepristone in any state where it is or becomes legally permissible to do so.’ 

Medication-induced abortions make up the majority share of abortions carried out today due to the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Dobbs v Jackson that revoked federal protections for the procedure.

The drug has had FDA approval for over two decades, which came after 12 years safe use in France.

The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether to roll back Biden administration efforts to ease access to the drug regimen during the pandemic, including allowing it to be prescribed online and sent through the mail. 

Mifepristone causes deaths in 0.5 per every 100,000 people who use the drug. The figure pales to the number of users of Tylenol and Viagra that die because of the medication’s side effects. According to official data, 0.8 per every 100,000 Tylenol users and 4.9 per every 100,000 Viagra users will die

Previously, mifepristone was only able to be dispensed by a physician in person at a subset of specialty offices and clinics because of safety concerns.

Mifepristone works by dilating the cervix – the lower end of the uterus that connects it to the vagina. 

The cervix allows fluids like blood to pass, and it naturally widens while a woman is giving birth.