Online platform for abortion pill paused after 5 days over high demand
Thuisabortus.nl, the website where women who want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy can get the abortion pill online, has been paused just five days after its launch. The demand was much higher than the medical team behind the site expected, and they could not keep up with assessing the requests. The site received around 30 requests per day, 150 in total, initiator Peter Leusink, a house doctor and sexologist, told NU.nl.
Women who want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy can go to the site up to 9 weeks into that pregnancy. They have to complete a questionnaire that a team of doctors assesses before approving the request. Upon approval, the abortion pill is sent to a pharmacy, where the woman can collect it.
The idea is to improve accessibility to abortion care. Without the website, women have to go to the general practitioner, an abortion clinic, or a hospital for the abortion pill. In some more remote areas, this means that women have to take half a day off work. And throughout the country, women may be faced with protesters at abortion clinics.
The anonymity the website offers was immediately much more popular than Leusink had expected. He thought the site would get “five to seven requests per workday,” he told NU.nl. But 30 a day was more than the organization behind the site, Ava, was prepared for. “We are a team of GPs doing this alongside our regular work. The idea was an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon, and an hour at the end of the day. We didn’t see this coming.”
More doctors are needed to carefully assess all the requests. Therefore, Ava paused the website on Friday. “We are training four or five extra doctors this week,” Leusink said. The online practice hopes to reopen after Easter. “Then there will always be someone working the full day.”
Thuisabortus.nl received criticism from the National Association of General Practitioners (LHV), the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG), and the Dutch Association of Abortion Doctors (NGvA), mainly because the website does not require women to consult with a GP before prescribing the abortion pill.
That is “patronizing,” Leusink told the newspaper. “A woman chooses the form of abortion that suits her. Women who want a conversation or want to receive information can simply go to their GP. But there is also a group that is perfectly capable of filling out a form detailing their own situation and reading the information on our website thoroughly.”
Leusink is deeply offended by a fellow GP who, speaking to NRC, compared the online request for an abortion pill to an impulsive act like buying a Snickers.
He does not expect that the website will substantially increase the annual number of nearly 40,000 abortions in the Netherlands. Most women would have sought treatment anyway, he said, the site just makes it easier on them.
Until January 2025, only licensed gynecologists or abortion doctors were allowed to prescribe the abortion pill. Since then, general practitioners can also do so, but in practice, only 3 to 4 percent of house doctors dispense the abortion pill.
The sexuality knowledge center, Rutgers, is also not worried that the website makes abortion care too accessible. “Where you get an abortion pill does not detract from how well-considered you make your choice,” Karin van der Velde, an abortion care expert at Rutgers, told NU.nl. “As if women couldn’t make their own choice without a conversation with a doctor.”
