ANCHORAGE, Alaska (LifeSiteNews) — A Planned Parenthood affiliate filed a lawsuit attempting to overturn an Alaska law requiring abortion pills to be dispensed in person.
Current state law requires abortions to be performed by a licensed physician in a hospital or other approved physical facility with informed consent and only for women who have been “domiciled or physically present” in the state for at least 30 days.
The Alaska Beacon reported that Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, & Kentucky (PPGNHAIK) filed a lawsuit in Alaska Superior Court challenging the provision limiting abortions to physical locations, claiming that denying so-called “telehealth” options denies equal protection of the “right” to abortion courts have previously recognized.
“Planned Parenthood’s patients often must travel significant distances to have an abortion in Anchorage or Fairbanks, sometimes at great expense and difficulty, including due to weather conditions,” the suit argues.
“We will have to review the complaint and have no comment on the specific allegations. As a general matter, the department will defend the law, which carries a presumption of constitutionality and represents state policy validly enacted by the legislature and the governor,” Acting Attorney General Cori Mills responded.
Meanwhile, legislation is pending to empower pharmacists to prescribe a range of drugs instead of just dispensing them, likely including abortion pills, which would render the lawsuit largely moot. The Alaska Legislature has passed it, but Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has not yet indicated whether he will sign or veto.
Mail-order abortion pills have become the abortion lobby’s most potent tool for preserving “choice” without Roe v. Wade. The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, that Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills. Planned Parenthood’s 2024-2025 annual report boasts it alone committed 434,450 abortions, a record number for the organization and 8% more than the previous year.
The abortion lobby’s zest to make abortion pills as easy as possible to distribute and obtain disregards a wealth of evidence indicating they are far from harmless to women even when taken with medical supervision. Pro-lifers point to an April 2025 analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) that concluded almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, plus similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation as part of a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.
Pro-lifers are currently waiting to see how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on legal challenges to the FDA’s lax abortion-pill regulations that allow the pills to be dispensed without an in-person medical visit before a long-promised Trump administration review of the safety data is finally released.